


Human Relations

by yellow_caballero



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Archivist Sasha James, Conspiracy Theorist Tim, Discussion of 19th Century English Racism and Slavery, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Gen, Horror office comedy, Jon is not literally an immortal psychic vampire, M/M, Monster Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha's Questionable Taste In Men, Season 2 AU, Tragicomedy, Trans Woman of Color
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:02:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25495069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellow_caballero/pseuds/yellow_caballero
Summary: Sasha James, newest Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, knows what she’s doing.That’s why she’s more than capable of ferreting out the secrets of the sketchy and suspicious Martin Blackwood. That’s why she can totally handle her hot-tempered and paranoid boyfriend Tim Stoker, even as he falls into a deep hole of paranoia and conspiracy.And that’s why she’s not scared of her boss. Even if he was creepy, overly rich, pretentious, quite possibly ate trauma, and was likely an immortal psychic vampire. There was nothing scary or dangerous about Jonathan Sims.Right?
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 73
Kudos: 399





	Human Relations

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen quite a few takes on Archivist!Sasha, and a few takes on immortal!Jon, some takes on Tim's Hero complex, and not nearly enough takes on Martin Blackwood being unbelievably creepy on complete accident, but have you considered...combining them?

“Our boss is an immortal psychic vampire and I can prove it,” Tim told Sasha two weeks after the worm incident, barging inside her office after hours. 

Sasha had only been back at work for two days, and she was already exhausted. Despite the two week recuperation period that Elias just _insisted_ she take, she felt tired and worn down. Sometimes it felt as if this job was grinding away parts of her, flaying her alive to expose the raw nerve underneath, but that couldn’t be true. She was just stressed, anxious about her promotion and keeping Tim and Martin in line, worried about impressing her bosses. 

...which is what she’d stopped telling herself after worms invaded the Institute, Tim almost died, Martin got lost in the tunnels and found a corpse, Sasha _would_ have died if not for the timely intervention of one of her bosses, and she was forced to chop short her gorgeous long curls to her shoulders after one too many worms died in it. 

She had worked _hard_ on her hair. 

“I’m not sure you can, actually,” Sasha said, wanting a nap. “I’m only listening to this if you brought me coffee.”

Tim thumped a cup of iced caramel latte from her favorite indie coffee shop that she had been forced to stop going to after Michael started stalking her there, which is how she knew this was serious. 

Right next to the coffee, he thumped down a thick folder full of what Sasha immediately recognized as Statements - if she was remembering right, the sketchy Statements that didn’t record and that were probably real. Next to _that_ , he threw down a printed out picture of their boss and Martin having lunch at the cafeteria. 

Sasha, always one to zero in on a weakness, squinted at the picture. “They’re eating lunch. Hardly a crime.”

“Exactly,” Tim hissed. He leaned in, hands gripping the edge of her desk, and Sasha quietly slid her coffee closer to her. There was something wild in his eyes, his normally perfectly gelled hair lying flat on his head, the thick cotton long sleeved shirt a sharp contrast to his usual Hawaiian print. “Martin _always_ eats lunch alone. Suddenly, the minute _you_ get promoted and _we_ get reassigned, they’re all buddy-buddy? I think not. Blackwood’s hiding something.”

“Tim, he told both of us about the CV -”

“Not that,” Tim said impatiently. “Something _big._ The kid’s a manipulator, I just know it.”

Sasha looked down at the picture. Sweet, in over his head Martin. Five years younger and far less educated than he pretended. Sure, he wasn’t the most competent guy, but that didn’t make him evil. “He can’t even file correctly. Why do you think he’s capable of manipulating both of us when we weren’t that close with him in the first place?”

“I don’t know, I’m working on that.” Tim straightened, frantically pacing the small, cramped length of her office. He tugged at his wavy black hair with one hand, chewing desperately at his lip. “I know he’s a good guy, maybe he’s been - brainwashed or blackmailed or whatever. I don’t know how thrallships work. That’s not important, don’t worry about that.” He turned on his heel, gesturing with an expansive motion towards the Statements. “Check out the recordings. They’re everything legitimate we have on vampires.”

“Didn’t you call those statements...uh, Twilight?” Sasha poked them cautiously. She had her own theories about how _weird_ the Statements made her sometimes, about how they made her go somewhere else or how they always seemed to bring the attention of something large and overwhelming and far too much down on her, but she knew better than to voice them. 

Especially to Tim. Maybe, once upon a time, she would have confided in him, but...something about the worm situation had cracked him. Or maybe he had always been cracked, and the worms just flaked the paint off. 

“You’ve believed in the supernatural since day one, don’t give me that. I’m saying that I think this thing goes further than we could possibly imagine.” Tim withdrew a small notebook from his pocket, easily flipping through it and listing off scattered pieces of evidence. “The first time I knew something was off with him was during my employee interview. I told him shit I’d barely even told _you_ , much less some prissy prick. It was as if I could feel him sapping my energy, drawing my secrets out.” Sasha squirmed uncomfortably. “He’s been actively working to help keep the tapes from us so we can’t investigate Gertrude’s death - by the way, Sash, I’m friends with this cop who -”

“Not another one of your cop _friends_ -”

“No, she’s a lesbian, and I think she’s for real. Anyway, our boss obviously has no idea how to work a computer. I don’t think he’s ever _touched_ one. He doesn’t even own a mobile! What kind of guy his age doesn’t even know what the internet is?”

Sasha shrugged uncomfortably. “Maybe he’s Amish?”

“Does he _look_ Amish?” Tim asked flatly, and Sasha was forced to concede the point. “What does he even do around here, anyway? What, he co-owns the place because his family is as rich as the Lukases, comes to England for the first time in god knows how long, and suddenly he’s always skulking around and interrogating you about random shit? It doesn’t add up.”

“If it wasn’t for him I would have died,” Sasha said flatly, and Tim abruptly shut up. “If it wasn’t for him getting that monster away from me in Artifact Storage I wouldn’t even be here talking to you now. I know he’s sketchy, Tim. I know he’s impeding your investigation into what happened with Gertrude. But…” She sighed, abruptly miserable, abruptly feeling very acutely like Tim’s boss who had no idea how to handle herself or him. “I have other things to worry about, okay? I’ll try to see what I can dig up on him. I will. But I’m kind of swamped just trying to understand…” She gestured widely, encompassing her cramped office and the teetering piles of boxes and the tape recorder that was still running, for some reason. “...all of this. It’s a lot. I can’t spend all my time worrying about what happened to an old woman with a lot of enemies, okay? And I can’t spend that time worrying about a technologically illiterate rich guy either.”

Something sharp and alien flashed in Tim’s eyes as he set his jaw at her. For the first time in god knows how long, maybe the only time, Tim looked at her as if she was a stranger. Maybe they were strangers to each other now, set distant by their diverging paths. Sasha didn’t know how to pull him back in. She wasn’t sure if she even wanted to. 

“I’m going to discover what happened to Gertrude,” Tim spat, something cold and ugly in his eyes, “because if I find you sitting at your Head Archivist’s desk riddled with bullet holes too I’ll never forgive myself. And because I _know_ that Jonathan Sims is at the center of this.”

And, of course, he was. But maybe that was always Sasha’s problem: that she had never quite been capable of leaving well enough alone. 

  
  
  
  


There was, of course, something incredibly fucking weird about Jonathan Sims the Fifth. 

It had been evident since their first meeting. Sasha had just received the email that morning that she was transferred to the Archives down the hall effective immediately, and had promptly been forced to fend off her coworker’s crying pleads to take her with them. Sasha knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, and had frantically thrown what little possessions she had (gas mask, thick rubber gloves, large and sturdy stick) in a cardboard box before booking it out of Archival Storage and almost running into Tim and that anxious bloke Martin in the hallway as they held their own grim procession towards their new stations. 

Tim, she was happy yet slightly awkward about seeing. Martin was awkward enough for the both of them, flushing and refusing to make eye contact with both of them as he nervously chattered about how he was looking forward to working with them. 

“Anybody know who the new Head Archivist’s going to be?” Tim had asked loudly, gallantly holding the door open for her as Sasha rolled her eyes at him. “Now that dear old Gertrude’s finally bit the dust?”

Sasha opened her mouth, about to protest out of some weird obligation for the woman who had not been a friend so much as a co-conspirator, but she closed it again. Gertrude had been...Gertrude, and in general it was best not to make vocal one’s association with her. That had been the old woman’s advice to her, at least. 

“My bet’s on Rosie,” Tim had said, steamrolling over her as he easily hefted his box of possessions into one hand and trooped in after them. “This place would fall apart without her - hullo, who’s this?”

Martin, who had been leading the procession, stopped short, forcing Sasha to skid to a stop on her teetering heels and Tim to crane his head over the both of them at the back. 

It was a newcomer in the Archives who had made Martin skid to a halt. He was obviously very tall, despite how he was folded up as he bent over what seemed to be an extremely old book that he casually flipped through as if it was a mass market paperback. He was wearing slightly yet obviously out of date formal clothing, his sweater vest and slacks fitting in closely with Elias Bouchard’s own antiquated sense of fashion. With his skin a smidge darker than hers, his gaunt cheeks and his close cropped hair styled in sharp twists, nothing about him seemed to particularly scream obscene wealth. 

“Hullo, there,” Tim said, muscling his way to the front. Sasha quietly rolled her eyes. He was already fashioning himself as leader. He’d have that position if he had anything to say about it. “Are you the newest member of our motley crew? Name’s Tim Stoker, I’m -”

“ - not important,” the strange man said. If Sasha squinted and ignored the thick waves of grey in his hair, she saw that he was even younger than her and Tim, maybe about Martin’s age. “I don’t work here.”

He didn’t look up from his book. Tim shot Sasha a ‘what an asshole!’ look. Martin, face poking out from his little mini gay pride flag tucked into what looked like a dozen tea mugs, looked like he was having a crisis. Sasha mentally slotted Martin under ‘disaster’. 

“Okay,” Tim said slowly, choosing the desk closest to the door and dumping his stuff down on it. “Then are you a graduate student? Because you aren’t supposed to be in here, mate. The public library’s upstairs.”

“He dresses like more of a professor to me,” Sasha laughed. “Get lost on your way to the fifties, eh?”

The man’s eyes rose from his book, and Sasha registered for the first time that they were a bright, unnatural, and arresting green. Almost neon green. There was no depth or humanity in them, no emotion or feeling, just a thin puddle of radioactive waste that wanted her to _hurt_ and _die,_ and Sasha registered all of this just as quickly as she dismissed it. You didn’t make it far in Artifact Storage by acting skittish. 

“I am well aware it is 2012,” the man said stiffly. 

Everybody stared at him. 

Finally, hesitantly, Martin offered, “I think it’s...uh, 2015? Actually?”

The man’s gaze snapped to Martin harshly, and Sasha found herself exhaling in half-relief. “That’s what I said. 2015.”

“That’s _not_ what you said,” Tim said, looking oddly delighted. “Did you forget the year? It’s July, mate.”

“The year changes too often. I think it should be longer.” The man went back to his book, looking extremely uncomfortable. “Fairchild agrees with me.”

Everybody kept staring at him, until finally Tim broke into a large grin and dropped onto the desk chair, propping the heel of his Chinos on the table. He folded his hands behind his head, grinning widely. “You’re a riot! Please tell me you’re sticking around. Everyone around the office is so boring.” He shot a wink at her. “Save Sasha James, of course.”

Sasha put her box on the table next to Tim, summoning a half-smile. “I’m glad you’re finding the positives in being moved here, Tim. I would have thought that you’d have nothing but complaints about being moved to the Archives.”

“They’re just so creepy!” Tim complained, sitting down in a chair and kicking his feet up on the desk. “Drafty, creepy basement. No windows. Not even a potted plant. This is a terrible workplace environment. Besides, it’ll kill my social life. You know what all the other employees say about Archive assistants.” He made his eyes big and wiggled his fingers, in a faux spooky motion. “They start out normal. Then they get weird, secretive. They start staying late, and coming in on weekends. Then they refuse to talk to you, huddling in the corner of the cafeteria. Then they disappear. One. By. One.”

“Do they?” Martin squeaked, clutching a potted plant from his box close to his chest as if it was a stuffed animal. “Disappear, I mean?”

“I looked up the old ones,” Tim said mysteriously, spinning languidly in his chair. “Emma Harvey. Quit mysteriously, nobody can get a hold of her. Michael Shelley - quit mysteriously, nobody can get a hold of him. Eric Delano. Guess how he quit? Mysteriously. Guess who can get a hold of him? Nobody. No Facebook, no LinkedIn. It’s like they all _died_. One. By. One.” He looked around theatrically, and Sasha and Martin leaned in. Even the strange man. “And we all know what happened to Gertrude, of course. Something’s fishy about this place, mark my words.”

An eerie silence settled around the office space, and Martin looked strongly as if he was about to puke from nerves. The strange man just seemed unimpressed, and maybe even a little amused. Sasha fought the urge to roll her eyes again. Tim’s chronic need to be the center of attention was his cutest and most annoying trait. She should defuse this - it wouldn’t do to have a coworker who was always jumping at shadows. 

“Thank god,” Sasha said finally, dumping her stuff on a desk next to Tim. Martin squeaked. “It’d be bollocks if we work in a spooky Institute to study the haunted shit in Britain and the place didn’t even have the decency to be haunted. I hope it’s ghosts.”

Surprised, almost entertained, the strange man barked a laugh. “You’re suicidal.”

“No, I’m bored.” Sasha sat down in her own chair, pulling out her laptop and making the strange man squint. “If I wanted to work in a normal place I’d have gotten that library job. What about you two? Why did you choose to work here?”

“They hired me?” Martin squeaked. 

But a strange shadow passed over Tim’s face, like the thin strip of flesh underneath the grinning plastic mask, and for a brief second his face twisted in hatred and disgust. “None of your business.” But then it was gone again, and his smile was as bright as ever. “Maybe I was bored too, eh?” He glanced at the man again, pearly white teeth turned to full blast. “What’s your name, mate? You never introduced yourself. Or said why you were creeping around locked spaces.”

“My _name_ is none -”

“Jonathan.”

Everybody jumped and straightened, whirling around to the doorway to see the Director of the Institute, Elias Bouchard, standing in the doorway with his hands clasped behind his back. Something about him was a strange mirror of Jonathan, as out of date and monochrome as he was, something identically haughty and cold in their bearings. Neither of their eyes had anything human or warm in them. But that was where the similarities ended: Elias Bouchard stank head to toe of wealth and privilege, smarmy to the core, and Sasha couldn’t help the ripple that went up her spine when she saw him. 

But Jonathan just scowled, even if Sasha noticed that he was the first person who he had given his absolute attention. “Director. You stole my book.”

Elias’ smirk broadened into a grin. “Like you stole my 1894 shipping ledger?”

“Your worthless ex-husband probably took it in your fifth divorce, don’t look at me.” Jonathan unfolded himself, standing up from his chair and tucking the ancient book under his arm casually. “I’m taking my books back, you filthy thief.”

“The same books that your _esteemed_ family donated in the twenties?” Elias gestured a hand at Jonathan, in a mockery of introduction. “Everyone, this is Jonathan Sims the Fifth. Co-owner of the Magnus Institute. His ancestor helped found the institute, along with Jonah Magnus. I asked him here to aid in the appointment of the new Head Archivist.”

“The same week I wash back up on London’s shores for the first time since you’ve looked _that_ ugly you drag me by the ear back to your infernal pet project,” Jonathan Sims drawled, and Sasha fought to keep her jaw from dropping. “I must decline to involve myself any further in your diversions. I just want my books back.”

“You hold no interest in the position of Head Archivist?” Elias asked in faux-surprise. “That’s ironic.”

“I would rather shake Perry’s hand than deal with you all day.” Jonathan Sims rolled his eyes, and Sasha mentally downgraded his estimated age. “You look like an idiot with that haircut and your Institute’s gone to shit.”

“It’s always so nice to have you here, Jonathan,” Elias said, smile still perfectly in place. “I know how packed your schedule is, what with your job of doing - _what_ exactly?”

“Haven’t you heard I’m the idle rich? I’m far too busy documenting every OSHA violation you have in this hellhole for such petty things as a job.”

“But Archivist would suit you _so_ well -”

“Better than the suit you’re wearing, I think. I didn’t know you were indulging in off the rack these days.”

“I didn’t know you were indulging in shopping from the discount rack at the charity shop these days, Jonathan. If you’re so hard off, I’m sure I could help you out.”

“Are you sure it’s not _your_ finances you’re worried about? Since you lost your sugar daddy, how are you affording those expensive skincare treatments?”

“Are they divorced?” Tim whispered to Sasha, likely louder than he meant to. 

Jonathan whirled around, furious. “I have _never_ been stupid enough to - with _this_ man - unlike _some_ Lukases I can name -”

“The Coronation,” Elias said, _far_ too smugly. 

“ _Fuck_ you, I was drunk -”

“You’re always drunk -”

“I have to be, to deal with you -”

“Are you still legally married to Georgina Barker, or has she dumped you for a fresher model?”

“We were drunk and it was Nevada, and there was an Elvis,” Jonathan said, practically stamping his feet. “It’s only legally binding in America, so it’s fine.”

“I have some bad news for you regarding global laws.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Sasha said, holding up a hand and cutting the inane squabble short. “Sorry, did you say you’re the descendent of _the_ Jonathan Sims?”

Jonathan Sims stiffened. “Yes. What of it?”

What _of_ it?

 _The_ Jonathan Sims the First, ancestor of the childish yet curt man in front of her, was the co-founder of the Institute along with Jonah Magnus. His portrait and portraits of all of his weirdly identical sons hung in the hallway leading towards the director’s office, and most importantly was noteworthy as one of the first Black sociologists in Britain. When his contemporary early 19th century Black thinkers were writing in defense of abolition and civil rights, Jonathan Sims the First seemed to find his interest in preserving and recording his culture for future generations. The ridiculous volume of letters exchanged between himself and Jonah Magnus were a popular subject of study in African Studies courses in England, and they could be found within the publicly accessible library of the Magnus Institute. 

Perhaps the most bizarre thing of all was that Jonathan Sims the Fifth was completely unaware of all of this until Sasha, who had doubled majored in History and Anthropology, cracked open her laptop and showed him the digitized records of his ancestor’s letters. 

It was the first time she had seen Jonathan Sims - Sims, as he was quickly known by, thanks to Tim’s barely concealed disdain - excited about something, fluorescent green eyes lighting up until there seemed to be something human lurking underneath them. 

The delights of showing a grown man what the internet was had been cut short by Elias’ smile, and the familiar way he reached up to clap an increasingly excited Jonathan on the shoulder as he tried to turn the page on the screen. 

“Jon, if you would be so good as to begin the search for our Head Archivist? I believe Gertrude’s old office is available if you wish to hold any interviews.”

“Oh, there’s no need for such formalities,” Jonathan said airly, straightening from where he was already hunching over her laptop. “I’m more interested in...lunch.”

Elias’ smile widened, and something crawled down Sasha’s spine. Something ancient and old, the instinct of prey in front of a predator. “I could arrange a satisfying meal for you. Tim, if you would do the honors?”

And that was that. 

And Sasha didn’t understand what had happened to Tim - what had happened to her, left so drained and vulnerable, what had happened to Martin who had left that room looking more terrified than she had ever seen anybody look before - until much, much later. 

But Sasha didn’t understand a lot of things back then, no matter how intelligent and cunning and experienced and mature she had thought she was. 

  
  


A week after her tense and awkward confrontation with Tim, Sasha found herself sitting at her desk in her stupid little office breaking into stupid little government databases to research her stupid and creepy little boss. 

It wasn’t even that she _disliked_ him. Of course she disliked him - he hung around Elias fuckin’ Bouchard way too much, exchanging in-jokes and surreptitious glances as if they spoke the secret language of wealth that nobody else could possibly decipher. He was rude and curt, not so much arrogant as genuinely unconsidering of the person across from him as a person. In the world of Jonathan Sims the Fifth nobody else was quite real, and nobody else was quite important. 

She could tell that it infuriated Tim, the way Sims’ eyes would just glaze over him. Tim needled him, teased him, sniped and snarked at him, but it just rolled off Sims’ back as if he didn’t even hear it. Sometimes she thought that what infuriated Tim the most was the fact that the only people he genuinely paid attention to besides his old friend Elias were Sasha and Martin.

Martin made sense, almost. The two ate lunch together frequently, even if Martin seemed to pray loudly to God for his safe delivery before doing so. Martin was clearly terrified of him, even more than he was terrified of most other things, but they continued hanging out. After a few months, Martin’s fear had slid slowly and surely into tired exasperation towards all of Sims’ little character quirks, like throwing around too much money, and casual disregard for arson. 

But Sasha...when Sims looked at her, he _looked_ at her, as if he saw straight through her to her soul, and he found her wanting. No, not wanting - not _there_ yet, like a seed that had yet to sprout. He knew just how to poke and prod her, trying to coax that seedling to break topsoil and flourish, but because Sasha never quite knew how to _respond_ she never quite knew how to defend herself. 

Sims asked her questions about her thoughts on the statements, about her thoughts on destruction and loneliness and vast empty spaces and bugs that skittered and crawled in the dark. He respected her opinions, listening carefully to her before offering some thoughtful remark. Sims was one of the first men in her workplace to always weigh and respect her opinions. He was the one who had convinced Elias that the CO2 canisters were necessary for employee safety - as he put it, the safety of ‘their Head Archivist and dear Martin’. Just like his ancestor, he was incredibly knowledgeable and a fascinating conversationalist on matters of sociology, anthropology, spiritualism, folk religions, and history, even if he was completely useless in matters of technology or popular culture. 

So Jonathan Sims was strange. So there was something not quite right about him, something so wrong that it could never be understood but it couldn't be ignored. What as it? What was this history she had yet to solve, this secret she had yet to uncover? 

Why did she have to _know?_

Maybe it wasn't that big of a deal. It was natural to have questions, and even more natural to seek out an answer to those questions no matter how illegal your methods. It wasn't exactly as if it was hard. Besides, it had been way easier than she expected to get the information she needed. Hacking, eavesdropping, invading privacy and propriety, had been getting easier and easier lately. This job had really kicked her hacker experience into high gear. She was even experimenting with turning microphones on remotely and recording conversations seeing if she could catch some of her more elusive prey in the act. 

This is why Sasha was dead certain, with no room for ambiguity or uncertainty: Jonathan Sims the Fifth didn’t legally exist. 

Oh, he had a birth certificate. He had a passport, and dual citizenship in both the United Kingdom and America, where he had spent the last twenty years or so. He had a social security number and a permanent residence in one of the swankiest neighborhoods in London, as well as several more flats scattered all over the world in every major financial and governmental district, from New York City to Hong Kong. He was twenty nine, a Gemini, and had never so much as received a parking ticket. 

What he didn’t have: a report card. Utility bills. A marriage certificate. A social or media presence before he was twenty five, which was apparently when his equally reclusive father died. There was no mother on his birth certificate, and from what Sasha could tell no mother _period_. His father had a legal wife, down as Georgina Barker - but didn’t Elias mention that his own wife was named Georgina Barker? The wife with no marriage or divorce records?

As far as Sasha could tell, besides the birth certificate Mr. Jonathan Sims the Fifth had sprouted into existence the day he turned twenty five, like Athena rupturing from Zeus’s skull. 

It was long past midnight. Sasha went deeper. 

It was the same situation with his father. Reclusive, not public at all, seemingly never got up to anything and died on his son’s twenty fifth birthday. Married to a woman who had no records or evidence either. 

Same as his grandfather. Same as his great-grandfather. 

Jonathan Sims the First, born estimated 1800, was the only one who seemed to have truly made any sort of public impact at all. Of course, considering his origins, there was little birth record either, but at least there was a footprint for him. He began appearing in the census in 1820, born to a freedwoman and an unnamed man, working as a servant in the house of a lord. If Sasha remembered her history right, that house was where he met Jonah Magnus, and the two began a lifelong friendship. 

Probably _more_ , as any rational person who’d read any of the letters more than a dozen young men frequently sent to Jonah Magnus would say, but historians were very rarely rational. 

He died in 1875, ten years before Jonah Magnus. At which point...Jonathan Sims the Second, previously unmentioned and unseen, twenty five years old, appears, and strikes back up that familiar and easy correspondence with Jonah Magnus before his timely death. 

Sasha sat back in her chair, eyes bloodshot and red, surrounded by Monster energy drinks. 

“Jonathan Sims,” Sasha whispered quietly to herself, in a stupid ‘fuck you’ against the eyes boring into the back of her neck every second of every day, “is the laziest immortal I’ve ever seen.”

Then she passed out at her desk. 

She was shaken awake by Martin, jolting up with a nasty case of bedhead. He was holding a cup of coffee, and pressed it silently into her hand and let her chug it with a disapproving expression. 

Sasha sighed, wiping her lip of the cream and setting the coffee back on the table. “I can explain.”

“You’ve only been back for a week,” Martin scolded lightly. “You shouldn’t push yourself too hard, you’re still recovering.”

On cue, her bandages itched, and Sasha lightly scratched her arm. “Sorry, I was - you know, on a research binge. Finding out...stuff.”

Martin blinked innocently at her. “What kind of stuff?”

“The...Denikin case. Tim asked me to look deeper into it.”

“No he didn’t,” Martin said, surely and confidently as he almost never was. “Tim marked that case closed a week ago. Besides, he never lets anyone who isn’t him look at the clown cases.”

“Don’t you have a job to do, Martin?” Sasha snapped, and Martin flinched. She was immediately stabbed with guilt, and Sasha forced herself to finger-comb her hair back into shape with shaking fingers. “Sorry. Sorry. I - it’s nothing. Really. I didn’t find anything.”

“Maybe I can help with your search…?” Martin asked hesitantly. 

“No.” She smiled wanly at him, and Martin smiled back. “Just boring Head Archivist stuff. Don’t worry about it.”

It wasn’t until Martin left, off to go research more cases or ineffectually try to stop Tim from rooting through his desk, that Sasha noticed that the file of vampire statements had moved. Where it was once tucked almost underneath her laptop, it was now set to the slight left of her desktop. Martin had moved it. 

Over the next two hours, Sasha found that although Martin didn’t _quite_ pass his background check, he wasn’t lying about his mortality either. Probably. Almost definitely. 

It wasn’t until she was twenty minutes into watching Tim’s Year Two ballet recital that she realized what she was doing and closed down her computer, disgusted with herself. They were her _coworkers_ . They were - they weren’t obscenely rich or Mennonites or overly familiar with Elias Bouchard despite being seemingly unable to remember his name. Tim and Martin were _normal people_ , even if they were probably a bit more supernaturally traumatized than the average joe off the street.

But she couldn’t help but wonder. And, like Tim, like Martin, she couldn’t help but distrust. If Sims really was hiding something so big and terrifying and important, if they still hadn’t caught Gertrude’s killer, then who’s to say what else everyone was hiding? 

Who could she trust, other than herself?

No. Tim and Martin were her friends. Tim was goofy but fiercely protective and intuitive, and Martin was kind and surprisingly intelligent. If she didn’t have them, she didn’t have anybody. Wasn’t that enough? 

But as she and Tim silently walked to the cafeteria in step with each other on their lunch break only to find Martin and Sims already deep in discussion with their heads bent close to each other in the far corner, Tim’s nostrils flared and his eyes widened in a move that almost made him look dangerous.

Sasha grabbed his arm, towing him just out of sight of the employees taking their well-earned breaks. She tugged him down a little and whispered in Tim’s ear. “I didn’t find anything on Sims.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Tim whispered back harshly. “He could still -”

“You don’t get it,” Sasha insisted, “I didn’t find _anything_.”

Tim’s eyes widened. 

“Martin’s the weak link,” she whispered, feeling as dirty as the worms that she still dreamed of each night, “we isolate him, and press him then.”

They ate lunch in a deli instead, down the street from the Institute, stretching out their legs until they tangled with each other’s, desperate for something grounding. 

Tim was going crazy. He was disappearing more and more, with little excuse or reason besides vague hints about his cop contact. Sasha thought that maybe she was going crazy too. She wondered if it was better to know, or if it was easier to think of yourself as the last sane person in the world. It seemed a little lonely. 

She wanted him to get a therapist. He said the therapist wouldn’t understand, that they’d think he was crazy. She said that he was out of control. He said that she wasn’t scared enough. And on, and on, and on, until Martin began to look extremely uncomfortable and they both stomped out the door. 

It was possible that Sasha wasn’t a good boss. Maybe that was why all those managerial handbooks said not to sleep with your employees. But, you know, the managerial handbooks didn’t have top ten tricks to deal with your employee’s worm trauma, so maybe they weren’t good for much. 

It dragged her down and tore her apart, trying to keep them together with her fingernails. Regardless of who she and Tim were to each other, they were family, and she didn’t want to lose one of the only - maybe _the_ only - friend she had. She wanted to include Martin too, to bring him in and make them really a team instead of a pile of fragments, but Tim didn’t trust Martin and she wasn’t sure that she did either, and it wasn’t as if their sketchy bosses were _helping_ -

September dragged on, and Martin continued disappearing at random points in the day and mysteriously furtively whispering to Sims in the hallways. Tim kept talking loudly about his hot date when a woman who dressed like a hijabi lawyer showed up in the doorway, looking impatient, and Sasha kept breaking pencils out of what was _not_ jealousy. 

Late in September, an invitation for a meeting appeared in Sasha’s calendar. With...Elias Bouchard. She scowled, accepting it. One of the incredibly numerous downsides of becoming middle management. 

It wasn’t as if she was unfamiliar with Elias Bouchard. He frequently dropped into the Archives, just to check in on them or act creepy or to fetch Sims, who he seemed to regard as a wayward puppy. Whenever Sims drifted into the Archives to devour its books (almost literally),you could usually count on Elias dragging him out by his ear. 

She just didn’t like Elias Bouchard. She really, really didn’t like him. Tim teasingly called it her woman’s intuition, which made Sasha feel very affirmed, but honestly anybody could see it. Man was a predator. 

The next day, she offhandedly mentioned the meeting to Martin and Tim during their staff meeting, which made both men look extremely furtive. Sure enough, when she left her office and locked it behind her, she found Martin quickly packing his rucksack while babbling something about going to the corner to pick up some more tea. Similarly, Tim was pulling on a jacket and citing a hot date. 

“I hope your _hot date_ isn’t getting in the way of your work, Tim,” Sasha said frostily. Martin winced, but Tim just shrugged. 

“She’s helping. Let us know how your cult meeting to summon the devil goes.” Tim grinned without humor at her. “If you sell your soul, make sure it’s for the market rate.”

“I’d settle for nothing less,” Sasha said sarcastically. 

“You know your own value,” Tim said. He glanced at Martin too, who was trying to sneak out the door. “You got a hot date too, Marto?”

Interestingly, Martin flushed deep red. “I - I could, you don’t know that.”

Tim snorted. “C’mon, you don’t have to buy your Yuri on Ice dakimakura dinner.”

Yikes. Sasha winced, uncomfortably aware of Tim’s tendency never to realize when he went too far into his needling. Martin’s face went stony, and someone who didn’t know him might have mistaken it for impassivity. “Hypocritical coming from the guy who fucks random people to make up for the fact that he can’t score a date with the one girl he actually likes.”

He slammed the door behind him. When Sasha risked a glance at Tim, she found his expression thunderous in rage, but when he noticed her looking he quickly covered it up with a bright grin. 

“Let me guess. You’re about to tell me how I totally deserved that?”

“You did,” Sasha said. “It’s not accurate about you, but what you said wasn’t accurate about him either.” She rolled her eyes, checking her watch. She did _not_ want to be late for this meeting. Elias was such a fucking stickler. “I’m not going to play feminine mediator for you two. I have to get going.”

God. As if she didn’t have enough to deal with. 

As she climbed up the four flights of stairs in her heels, as she waved at Rosie, as she walked down the hall of intimidating men in stuffy portraits glaring down at her, she considered just quitting. 

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had the thought a million times since she started this shit job. It was too much. It paid well - almost weirdly well - and the work was interesting, and in many ways it really was objectively her dream job, but in practice it was more like a nightmare. She was scared all the time, and was sleeping less than usual. She felt like the sole person trying to keep their dumb little team together, and even then she never tried hard enough. 

Why hadn’t she quit? Why hadn’t Tim quit? She wasn’t _that_ desperate for money, not as much as Martin was, although god knew she needed it. She could get a job anywhere. She was qualified, and talented, and nothing was worth this persistent misery and fear -

These thoughts, crowding up her head and stifling her, blew away the minute she knocked and opened the door to Elias’ office. 

It was big, rectangular, and was a strange mix of austere and cramped. She was forcibly reminded of curio displays from the 1800s, cabinets of curiosity where knick-knacks and novelties were displayed from all over the world. Elias’ desk stood near the far wall, with a sofa pressed up against it behind him with a tea service set to the side. The other wall was entirely shelving - bookshelves, mostly, but with large shadowboxes set up for display. 

The apparent human skull was always what fascinated her the most, resting on top of several books, but there were other items: jewelry, a jar of dirt that seemed to shift and sieve, a mercury thermometer, a whittled flute. Sasha always had to repress the urge to touch all of it. She felt somehow as if each item had a Statement behind it, just waiting. 

“Ms. James, excellent. Do sit down.”

“Must I attend this rot?”

Sasha whipped around, embarrassed to be caught staring at the novelties. Elias sat primly behind his desk, all carefully pressed grey suit and receding grey hair and grey loafers and black gloves. Behind him, lounging carelessly on the sofa and throwing a tennis ball carelessly at the wall and letting it smack back into his open hands when it careened back towards him, was Jonathan Sims the Fifth. Possible immortal. Definite asshole.

“You’re the one who keeps telling me how interested you are in the development of our fine Head Archivist,” Elias said, forcing a smile, “so I would suspect so.”

“I don’t understand how you have the patience for this meaningless bureaucracy,” Sims whined, throwing the ball at the wall and catching it without even looking. Sasha carefully sat down in the uncomfortable chair in front of Elias’ desk - likely some stupid power play - and straightened her skirt. “Your tendency towards micromanagement limits you.”

“My tendency towards micromanagement means I don’t make mistakes,” Elias said, not even looking back at Sims. “Unlike you.”

“I don’t -”

“Barcelona.”

“Fuck you, that was Georgie’s fault.”

“Amsterdam?”

“That one was me,” Sims said grudgingly, “but in my defense, I was drunk.”

“You’re always drunk, idiot,” Elias said, and Sasha wondered if she was hallucinating the faint notes of fondness. He turned his attention to her, so strangely familiar yet always terrifying. “Ms. James, thank you for coming. I just wanted to have a brief check-in with you about your progress organizing the Archives, organizing your team, and so on. You’ve been doing quite an admirable job so far. We really have no complaints here.”

“I have complaints,” Sims said, seemingly unspeakably and unforgivably bored. “I know the drama entertains _you_ , but I think James and Stoker are living in sin and that he should just make an honest woman out of her and propose.”

“How the _fuck_ ,” Sasha said slowly, “is that _any_ of your business.”

How did they even _know_ -

Martin. Obviously. She was gonna kill the asshole.

“We like to keep abreast of things here,” Elias soothed her, so much as you could call him soothing, “just so we know about any issues before they develop. There are no issues. Correct?”

“Correct,” Sasha said, forcing her breath into even inhales and exhales. “The reorganization of the Archives is going...fine. We’re switching to a new system, and it’s taking some manpower, but so far we’re trying to operate based on a more classical approach -”

And then she was off. This was something Sasha knew, something that she could do with her eyes closed, and she even felt herself growing confident. Even if she didn’t know anything in her life anymore, even if nothing made any sense any longer, she knew this. She always would. 

Sasha James was _good_ at her job, no matter how it felt sometimes. Most of the time. 

And Elias hummed and nodded and asked further questions, but he didn’t seem truly engaged or interested. As if it was just something he had to check off on the list. Which, you know, fair. To a management type, archive work must not seem that interesting. Sims, despite his antipathy, was far more interested than he was letting on. Sasha didn’t know how she could tell that Sims was carefully registering every word from her, but he was. She could feel it. 

Like a butterfly pinned to a corkboard, Sasha flapped and flapped and flapped. And Sims catalogued _everything_.

He was the one who eventually cut her off when she started to ramble about digitization procedure. “What’s your evaluation of your team?”

Uh. Sasha’s brain tripped on this, mixed in with the fact that both of these sneering rich men _knew_ she hadn’t stopped sleeping with Tim, and she really shouldn’t have and she knew it it was so freaking immoral, but she had been so stressed and lonely and always always always watched and Tim was the only person who had been there, who could make all of that go away, and she had always been the type to find any port in a storm and that’s why she _got_ this stupid job -

Elias smiled. As if he knew. 

No, no, he wasn’t a mind reader, don’t be paranoid. They can’t afford for both her and Tim and Martin to break down into abrasive paranoia, then they’d all fall apart. 

Elias smiled wider. 

Okay. Something was fucking _up_ with that guy. 

“They’re fine,” Sasha said finally, fully cognizant that if Elias was a completely normal non-murdery dude then she had been silent for a weirdly long time. “Tim’s made a lot of progress in verification and fact checking for the Statements. Martin’s...inexperienced...but he’s making progress in filing too.”

“I’m sorry,” Elias cut in, “did you say statements?”

“No, Statements.”

“She obviously said Statements, Director,” Sims said, irritated.

“Of course, Statements.” Elias grinned. “My apologies, carry on.”

“Uh. Sure.” What was that? Whatever. “So...we’re working hard, I guess?”

“No...problems?” Elias raised an eyebrow. “You’ve all been through a traumatic event. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some...friction.”

“No friction,” Sasha said, through gritted teeth. “We’re fine.”

“Director, this is dull,” Sims whined, and casually threw the ball across the room. It crashed, either by coincidence or in unerring precision, against the jar of dirt, knocking it with a thunk clunk to the ground. “Let’s eat.”

Something flickered in Elias’ eyes - frustration? - before he swiveled his chair slightly behind him, towards Sims. “You just ate recently. So soon?”

“It’s been a while since I’ve had a promising heir,” Sims said, casually unfolding himself off the couch and stretching, making Elias scowl. “I forgot how much it saps my energy. If I was still in America, I would have passed three bills by now.”

“Yes, I understand you’re very impressive.”

“I’m just saying, I’d be doing _real_ worship instead of this little song and dance ritual you have set up.”

“Uh,” Sasha said. 

“You tend to define worship creatively,” Elias said tightly. “Ms. James, you’re excused. Have a nice day.”

Sasha slowly stood up, backing out of the room. 

“I miss China. I was actually productive there. Did some of the best work of my career with the Chinese government,” Sims said, having seemingly forgotten she was in the room. “Why aren’t I at our Chinese facility right now?”

“Because the Chinese situation isn’t _uncertain_ ,” Elias hissed, and Sasha slowly opened the door and started leaving the room, “it’s not my fault England’s penchant towards democracy makes your work difficult.”

“Outdated system, outdated country,” Sims snorted. “This country is full of backwards, elderly white men like you. It’s holding it back. Have you heard about the latest privacy laws I got passed in America? Now _there_ ’s spyware -”

“Watch who you’re calling _elderly_ -”

Sasha slowly closed the door, _very severely_ not wanting to know. 

She huddled in the hallway for a second, ignoring the creepy eyes of James Wright or whoever boring down on her, as she pulled up her texting app and hovered her thumb over Tim’s name. She had to tell him about her meeting. Those two guys were weird as hell, and whatever weird conspiracy he was on about might be worse than he imagined -

But he was on a date-not-a-date, swear my cop friend is just slipping me some cassettes, and she didn’t want to intrude. Sasha bit her lip, thumb not moving. She should break it off, right here, right now. If only…

“Are you religious, Ms. James?”

Sasha jerked her head up, heart jumping in her chest, only to find Jonathan Sims standing in front of her. Way too close, actually, way closer than was socially normal for two almost strangers - but since when did Sims do what was socially _normal_?

“That’s not an appropriate question for the workplace,” Sasha said, mouth dry. 

“Is it?” Sims raised his eyebrows, as if he genuinely hadn’t known. Had he ever had a real job…? From his catfight with Elias, it sounds like he had some kind of job as a Republican or something in America and China, but it also hadn’t sounded like that at all. What did he do here? What was his job? Was he even an employee here? He kept saying that he wasn’t, and he never really seemed busy, but why else…? “Humor me.”

“I’m Catholic,” Sasha said, mouth working almost on its own. “Not sure how much I believe, though. Or belong. They don’t tend to like people like me.”

“I suspect not.” Sims stepped closer, and Sasha couldn’t bear to step back no matter how much she wanted to. He loomed down on her - and in heels, _very_ few people loomed down at Sasha, but something about him was just so effortlessly intimidating. Everything about him made her skin crawl. His neon green eyes swam in her vision, chased her dreams. “Raised devout by your parents, were you? My grandmother raised me devout as well - albeit in her traditions, long since mostly lost to time and the short memories of man. We were called pagans, back then. I believe I’d be called a pagan now. I admit I was never fond of the term, but I see its uses.” He paused thoughtfully. “A dear friend of mine arranged to have me converted to Christianity, of course. For the aesthetics. He was always very dedicated to the aesthetics. Made a show of civilizing me. Do you think he was successful, Ms. James?”

“Uh,” Sasha said, desperately trying to escape. 

“My god would welcome you, you know,” Sims said, and Sasha _really_ wanted away from this conversation. “It takes all kinds. It’s...what’s the word, nondiscriminatory. And its adherents worship in whatever way they see fit. I am afforded my freedoms. As you would be. Are you interested?”

“That’s very...kind…” Sasha backed up, cautiously slipping to the side and stepping backwards yet again, “...but I really have to get back to work.”

Sims tilted his head, fixing her in his alien and piercing gaze. “You will be, I think. I am patient. When you are interested in what my god can give you, we may resume this conversation. I am dearly looking forward to it.”

“What can your god give me?” Sasha asked, against all better judgement.

But Sims only looked surprised. “Power. Isn’t that what everybody wants?”

“I don’t care about that,” Sasha said. 

“Funny.” Sims tilted his head. “That’s what Martin said.”

At that, Sasha gave up on all semblance of politeness and left, heels clicking furiously down the terrifying hallway full of stares, stares, stares, fleeing the alien man with the inhuman eyes who stared, and stared, and stared, and saw her even as he stared right through her. 

  
  


She had to do something about Sims, and Martin, but she didn’t have the chance for weeks. 

That chance finally came as that dreadful and tense September bore on into November, a rare moment when Sasha could feel unwatched and private. Elias was gone from the Institute, leaving Sims in charge - which meant that Sims dropped by the Archives once a day instead of a few times a week in order to raid their library and bitch about how ‘the idiot Director thinks he can con me into babysitting his pet project, I’ll show _him_ spreadsheets’ before harassing Martin about a tv show Martin had recommended him and disappearing again. Sasha didn’t know what was more worrying: that Sims apparently had _never watched television_ before Martin bullied him into it, or that he was thoroughly enjoying Parks and Recreation. 

But Tim had come prepared, and he loudly asked Sims about his opinion on a particular treatise on niche spiritualist communities in Victorian London that Tim had liberated from the library. Apparently, the treatise was garbage and Lord Worthington was a hack and a fraud who had terrible taste in coats and abused his servants, and Sims was ranting for long enough that when Martin left the office to disseminate his cookies amidst the receptionists in his weekly intel gathering session Sasha was able to slip out and follow him. 

She and Tim were in this together, whatever that meant. Did that mean that they were in this together against Sims, Elias, and Martin? Who was the enemy, and who was the ally? If saving her life didn’t make someone an ally, and if increasingly frantic and crazed ranting at her late at night over drinks didn’t make someone an enemy, how could she force those words into some semblance of meaning? 

“Martin.”

Martin jumped almost a foot in the air, whirling around to see her standing several feet away from him in the hallway, leaning against the wall. He had been twitchy, since - well, since he was hired. 

“Sasha! Sasha, sorry, you startled me.” He exhaled heavily, pressing the hand unoccupied by tupperware against his chest. He gave her a shaky grin. “Can’t really afford too many more scares, you know?”

“Right.” Sasha kept her eyes locked on his, her brown ones meeting his dark ones. So dark they were almost black - a strange contrast to Sims. “I have something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“That’s a surprise,” Martin said flippantly, before promptly blanching. “I mean, uh, shoot!”

“What do you mean by that?” Sasha asked.

“I mean, uh -” Martin clutched the tupperware tightly to his chest, seemingly unaware he was doing it. “You just don’t tend to...ask my advice on stuff. Very frequently. Anyway, what can I help you with?”

Her heart was thumping in her chest, and to her shame she found almost that her knees were shaking. Why was she scared? What was so scary about the prim and dismissive man with eyes straight out of Cheronobyl? 

“What do you know about Jonathan Sims?”

Martin didn’t even blink. He didn’t miss a _beat_. “Terrible taste in telly, mostly. Keeps on insisting that Kitchen Nightmares American’s superior to ours. Why?”

Liar. Liar, liar, liar! Sasha was sick of the _lies_! “But that’s not why you’re scared of him.”

Martin’s eye twitched. But he was always twitching, really. “Yeah, Sash. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he’s our boss’ boss and he can get quite harsh. If you don’t mind, Rosie’s expecting me any second -”

All Sasha wanted was the truth. And she was going to get the truth, even if Martin didn’t want to give it. They couldn’t afford to mess around anymore. They were all scared, even Sasha, and - and Sasha was tired of being scared. She didn’t know that eternal, incessant fear was something that you could get _tired_ of. Like most bad things, she had assumed that you could simply grow used to it, until it was as persistent and normal as hunger or sadness. But each time she felt it, it was even more awful, until it wore her down into nothing. 

“Martin Blackwood,” Sasha said, and maybe the worst part was that she had no idea what she was doing, that she had no idea that she was stepping off the soft grass of her human life into the long and winding path that she would never escape, “tell me the _truth_.”

And he did. 

When Martin spoke he was vomiting the words, as if they were being pulled out of him with a hook, a vile and filthy thing that was regurgitated like bile. 

“The _truth_ is that I hate how you and Tim are always sneaking around behind my back, I hate how your dumb het romance is making it so awkward to be in the office especially since you both think I’m either an idiot or a traitor to whatever weird crusade you have going on. It sucks because I actually am a traitor to the human race but it’s super unwillingly. At least I think it’s unwilling because I definitely want to fuck Jon despite him being an evil immortal. I think you two have finally cottoned onto the super obvious, which is great except I found out months ago and I couldn’t tell any of you because Jon said that he’d kill me if I told you, and I really hate how hot I find that.”

Martin shut up abruptly, cheeks flushed a deep red, and Sasha found herself abruptly and strangely ashamed. 

“Why did I tell you all of that,” Martin whispered. He blanched. “Oh my god, Jon’s going to murder me.”

“No, he’s not,” Sasha said, despite how hard her heart was thumping in her chest and how much her head was spinning. She stepped forward, holding out her hands in an attempt to be the comforting and authoritative figure she had always wanted to be to Martin, except he stepped away from her. He sneered at her, as if he had never even really liked her. “Martin, Sims isn’t going to hurt you.”

“You don’t know that,” Martin said, stepping back further and further, expression lined with disgust. “How did you get me to say that? Jon - Jon can do that.” He stepped back, and Sasha’s heart lurched. “Why can you do that?”

“Oh my god,” Sasha whispered, horrified, “Sims turned me into a psychic vampire too.”

“What the fuck are you _on?_ ”

  
  
  


As it turns out, Martin explained as they huddled in the same down the street deli because apparently Elias _literally_ had eyes in the back of his and also everybody else’s head, Sims was not a psychic vampire. 

Well. Martin didn’t rule it out. Really, none of them knew what he was. 

“He calls himself an Archivist,” Martin said, biting into a thick sandwich with yellow sauces dripping off slimy deli meat. “But, like, with a capital A. Kind of like you, only...more so.”

“More so? More so what?” Sasha sipped anxiously at her beer, before chugging it even more anxiously. “All I do is record made up shit and some real shit and make some stupid-ass enemies and stupider friends. I don’t do shit.”

“You got me to tell you something I was told under pain of death not to tell anyone,” Martin said reasonably, masticating his sandwich with slow undulations before swallowing. “And you always know where Tim hides your keys. It’s like his sixth stupidest game.”

“...I don’t just leave them everywhere by accident?”

“He hides them.” Martin put the sandwich down on a paper plate and wiped his fingers with a scratchy brown napkin. Sasha put her beer down, abruptly nauseous. “It pisses him off how you don’t even notice. He also switches your lunchboxes all the time with his and you always pick up the right one anyway. He’s starting to think you’re part of the psychic vampire conspiracy, by the way, so you should clear that up before he starts rooting through your rubbish like he is mine.”

Psychic vampire conspiracy. Sasha picked at the soggy label of her beer, trying her best not to look too anxious in front of her subordinate. But she was starting to worry that stuff like that soon wouldn’t mean very much at all. “So, about Jon being an immortal vampire…”

“Definitely immortal. Probably not a vampire.” Martin sipped his lemonade carefully. “I tried digging a little, because the vampire thing definitely crossed my mind too, but he called Dracula a, and I quote, ‘silly pop novel for women’, so...jury’s out.”

“God, my life got stupid,” Sasha whispered hoarsely, chugging her beer. 

“Tell me about it,” Martin said flatly, inured to the horrors of his everyday life, “I’m stuck teaching the evil blackmailing psychopath what Jeremy Kyle is.”

“How did this even happen?”

“Well, first we watched Dr. Oz, then -” at the look at Sasha’s face, Martin quickly backtracked. “Right. So, as you know, I used to eat lunch alone…”

  
  
  


As they knew, before Martin joined the archives he ate lunch alone.

Specifically, he found a secret spot just for him. Well, not _that_ secret, you know, but secret enough. At the very least it was one of the few places in the building that was usually abandoned. There was nothing Martin hated more than eating by himself in a crowded cafeteria. It just made him feel so lonely, you know?

Well, maybe you don’t know. You have lots of friends, Sasha, and you’re so confident and pretty, you probably don’t get it. Anyway…

That spot was in the hallway, the same empty hallway that just has Elias’ office. You know, there’s a small lobby with Rosie’s desk and then that way too long hallway just to intimidate you and then Elias’ office is at the end. 

Well, it’s _almost_ empty. You know. On the right wall there’s big portraits of all of the scary old white men that make up the directors of the institute, James Wright all the way to Jonah Magnus. They all have the same eyes, you know. Identical eyes, down to the flecks of grey. 

Anyway. On the _opposite_ wall is every Jonathan Sims. Jonathan Sims one, two, three, and four. And Martin enjoyed sitting on the bench against the right wall, chewing his ham and mustard sandwich and looking at the paintings of every Jonathan Sims. 

It’s almost romantic, you know? Those serious green eyes, that furrowed brow, the way that fashion gently changed with the tides of time. In the first painting the clothing is almost too stuffy, you know, it’s all uncomfortable and stiff on Jon. But in the last one, he wears the suit as if it was a second skin, as if he really was who he had spent so long pretending to be. 

He was scarred, Jonathan Sims. In a really unique way too. Martin noticed, staring day after day after day at those portraits. Circular scars trailing up and down his arms and peeking out over his collar, a thin slash over his throat. Burns lightly coating the back of his right hand. They’re...well, they’re a little distinctive. 

Eventually, Martin realized that the family resemblance was more than a resemblance. All the men were identical, down to the strange scars. It didn’t take a genius, you know. 

And when he saw Jon that first day, hunched over that antique book looking like a man out of time and out of place…

Well. It didn’t take a genius. 

And Martin wasn’t a genius. 

See, he wasn’t _you_ , Sasha, so smart and competent and professional. And he really was nothing like Tim, all hot and confident and masc. He was just Martin! Just ol’ Martin. Dumb, clumsy, clutzy, and painfully sincere. No way someone like Martin could pull one over on the actually accomplished Sasha and Tim. 

That’s what he told Jon, anyway. When Jon found out. When Jon pulled him into that cramped, claustrophobic office for his interview, and he _took_ and he _took_ and he _took_ and he even dragged out what Martin had already decided was too stupid to ever mention. 

Jon told him that Martin could keep a secret, couldn’t you? 

Elias told him that Martin would do what was safest for him and his mother, couldn’t you?

Martin told them that yes, definitely, you can count on him. 

That was ol’ Martin. Dependable. Safe. Unassuming. Twitchy. Really just incapable of any sustained and permanent deceit. Never mind that he had lied just fine to three different workplaces for almost a decade now. Martin was just too honest to lie.

Martin wasn’t a threat to anyone - not Sasha, not Tim, not Elias, not Jon. 

And the thing about Jon was that, really, deep inside, he was just as lonely as Martin. 

Which Martin could use. 

So he did. 

  
  
  


Sasha stared at Martin, who was peacefully breaking salt and vinegar crisps between his teeth with a sharp crack, her jaw wide open.

“You’ve been stringing along _the immortal monster_?”

“I prefer to think of it more as emotionally catfishing,” Martin said serenely, chewing his crisp. “He started out, you know, just intimidating me, getting me to spill shit on you and Tim, the usual. Then we started talking about reality telly? He didn’t know what it was. Then I showed him Doctor Phil on a lunch break and he was hooked. I’m trying to get him into Dolly Parton now, I think I can convert him into country and western.”

“And this...makes him less evil?”

“Maybe?” Martin shrugged, shoving the final corner of his sandwich in his mouth and swallowing. “I made him watch Steven Universe and now he’s stopped eating the trauma of random people on the street. Did you know he does that? It’s weird as hell.”

“He...eats trauma?”

“Yep. Judging from his weird ominous statements about your ‘progress’,” Martin made indicative air quotes at that, rolling his eyes, “I think you’re going to start doing it soon too. No pressure.” Martin looked contemplative. “Hey, maybe he is a psychic vampire, in a weird way.”

Sasha struggled to reconcile the fact that Sims turned her into a psychic vampire with what she understood of herself, her workplace, and her world. 

“You understand that if you tell him that you know any of this, he will snap my neck,” Martin said, as calmly as if he was discussing the weather. 

That calm proclamation threw her. “I thought you two were friends?” She thought that they might _like_ each other, how could…?

“Oh, we are. You don’t understand Jon. He’s kinda…” Martin whirled a finger around his head in a ‘crazy’ motion. “...from being that old. And from the company he keeps, which I _really_ shouldn’t say anything about because that secret’s bigger than my head. He really thinks that attempted murder is just one of those things friends do to each other. And, you know, actual murder.” Martin propped his chin on his hand, eyes going a little distant. “I don’t think he understands death. Not like we do. He doesn’t understand how deeply he’s fucked up my life, because to him a few months of anxious misery is like an uncomfortable dentist’s visit. He’s...monstrous, I guess.” Martin sighed. “It’s super sexy.”

“Hm,” Sasha said, hating this. 

They walked back to the Institute in contemplative silence. Martin’s hands were buried in his windbreaker, face tilted up to feel the breeze on his face, a small smile flitting across his expression. Sasha found herself almost enraptured by it. She had never seen Martin so calm, or at peace. It was as if a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He looked both much older, and much younger. Maybe the truth had set him free. 

Sasha couldn’t imagine being that carefree. She felt locked tight with anxiety and fear. Was she turning into something? A monster, incapable of understanding human joys or sadness? Would she end up like Jonathan Sims, a lonely immortal?

No. So long as Tim was there, he wouldn’t let her be lonely. He had promised that he wouldn’t abandon her, that they’d be best friends until death. Except he had been growing so distant lately, almost frantic in his misguided attempts to protect her, and -

“We have to tell Tim,” Sasha said, dodging the thick London lunch rush crowds. “He’ll go mental if he thinks that we’re hiding something from him. I know this is a big secret, but -”

“Sure.” At Sasha’s startled silence, Martin shrugged. “He’s an assistant, it’s not like he can be fired.”

“It’s not like he can _what_ -”

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Martin said, infuriatingly calm. “Elias can...well, he has a way of finding out secrets. He’ll know I told you. This is it for me, I guess.”

Then he started whistling, a melody Sasha recognized as an old War War I marching jingle, and marched casually next to the stunned Sasha towards what he understood to be his death. 

She had thought that they would have more time - time to talk, or plan, or plot. But it was almost instant. The minute they crossed the threshold of the Archives, what Sasha was rapidly becoming to think of as home, they saw Sims standing in front of Martin’s desk. 

He was playing with an Overwatch Funko Pop, one of Martin’s many, pursing his lips and twisting it left and right as if the cheap molded plastic would divine its secrets to him. Tim was furiously working away at his own desk, clearly stewing at Sims’ infringement into their space that he insisted on with such regularity. He didn’t even have to look up to know that Martin and Sasha had entered, keeping his eyes locked on the figurine. 

“Good, you’re here. Explain to me the appeal of this figurine. It has no articulated joints, and is not suitable for play by children, so that rules out the nostalgia factor.” Sims rapped a finger on it, listening carefully for the echo. “The make is cheap and mass produced - suitable for your finances, I suppose, but you could afford better. Martin, if a workplace decoration that calls to mind your recreational activities is what you desired, I could have simply bought you that Portal Gun you desired so badly. Even if I don’t understand why you don’t want a _real_ -” He looked up, and something in Martin’s sheepish expression stopped him short. “Ah.”

“Sorry,” Martin said. “She’s coming along as fast as you said.”

But Sims just stared, and for the first time Sasha could have sworn that his expression relaxed. From tight and drawn and formal into something loose, and strangely vulnerable. She had only seen that shattering before whenever Elias was in the room, the two always devolving into pointless bickering within minutes, but something about this was different. As if Martin was safe, for Sims. For Jon. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Tim asked Jon rudely, and Sasha minutely shook her head. She was transfixed, instead, by the strange interplay happening between Martin and Jon: the one person she had spent far too much of her time obsessing over, and the one person she hadn’t been paying nearly as much attention to as she should have. 

It was weird to think that Martin could be so important to a person like Jon that he could put that look on his face. It didn’t seem natural. It aggravated Sasha, more than it should have, that there had been something so profound and strange happening in her Archives and she hadn’t even known. 

“This is -” Jon said suddenly, before stopping just as suddenly. Sharply and strangely, he said, “We haven’t finished Lost yet.”

“The ending’s bad,” Martin said sympathetically. “It’s not worth it.”

“The public was wrong about Skylar and it could be wrong about Lost too,” Jon said firmly. “It is worth it. I will speak with the Director. I’m certain we can come to some arrangement.”

“Wow, Jon,” Martin joked weakly, “I’m surprised you care.”

“Do not presume to tell me what I feel,” Jon snapped. “I will speak to the director. And I will be back momentarily, and my Archives will resume as normal. With _every_ assistant.”

“Not even you know what you feel,” Sasha mused quietly, “do you?”

Jon whirled on her, sickly green eyes flashing bright and hot, approximate to human. “Elias Bouchard is a devout acolyte. But I am the hand of _god_ , and he does not presume to control _my_ desires.”

He stalked out, slamming the door after him, and Martin and Tim watched him go. But Sasha was watching Martin, the wry half-smile on his face. 

“He totally digs me,” Martin whispered, and Sasha was startled into a laugh, and found that she could not stop. 

  
  
  


That night, Sasha re-made a stupid decision she had been making roughly far too many times, and stayed over at Tim’s. 

They just lay together for a while afterwards, just touching each other. Sweat and darkness and warm isolation from the cold world outside, where everything wanted to hunt and hurt and kill them. In here, at least, in Tim’s stylish but dinghy flat and lying on the bamboo pillows that he swore by, nothing could hurt them.

Unusually for them, Sasha broke the late night silence. “I can’t stop thinking about Martin.”

Tim groaned, burying his head into her thick hair. “That’s the _last_ sentence I want to hear from you, right here, right now -”

“I’m serious, you jerk -”

“Look, just tell me right now if you want to replace me, but I really don’t think he’ll love you back unless you change your mind about a lot of things very quickly -”

“Don’t you think it’s kind of messed up?” Sasha asked, and Tim fell silent. “That Martin wants someone who was so bad for him that much? Do you think it means that he...I don’t know, hates himself?”

Tim was silent for a long moment, thinking over what her words. She and Martin had explained the situation to him, which had given him so much validation horniness that he and Sasha had went back to his place almost directly afterwards. 

“I want everything in my life that’s bad for me,” Tim said finally, voice hoarse. “If that means I hate myself...well, probably.”

Sasha took his hand, squeezing it tightly. “You want me, and I’m _great_ for you.”

“My streak is broken!” Tim gasped, in mock-affront. “Quick, Sash, how quickly can you get me into drugs?”

“I’ve already tempted you into promiscuity,” Sasha said with a straight face. “What would your mother say?”

Tim just snorted, flopping onto his back and letting Sasha pillow her head on his chest. “Please. That woman wouldn’t recognize me on the street if she saw me. She hasn’t seen me in ten years.”

“My mother definitely would not recognize me on the street.”

“Street says trans rights.”

“Tim, I’m worried about you,” Sasha said, cutting the jokes short. They could joke and tease and needle all day, but sometimes it just felt so hard to talk to Tim about something real. “You’ve been getting...you know.”

“...in my defence, I was right.”

“You were not right about Martin being evil.”

Shadows played across Tim’s face, throwing it into cold relief. “I wasn’t?”

“Tim!”

“Alright, alright.” Tim huffed slightly. “I was right about him being a manipulative little sneak, though.”

“And I’m growing psychic monster powers,” Sasha said dully. “Nobody’s perfect.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Tim whispered. 

“You can stop it?”

“I won’t let that happen,” Tim repeated, and Sasha wished that she could believe him. 

In this safe space, in this safe circle of Tim’s arms, she almost could believe it. That Tim would always keep her safe, that he wouldn’t let her turn inhuman, that he and his weird and scary cop friends would track Gertrude’s murderer who at this point absolutely had to either be Jon or Elias down and pump them full of lead or whatever hypermasculine business they wanted to get up to. 

But it was a fantasy, warm and soft and fun, and Sasha had been finding herself increasingly intolerant of lies. 

She wondered if Tim would still love her if her eyes became cold and green. 

He loved her now. She knew it like she knew where her keys always were, like she knew the angle of the spin of the world and the Dewey Decimal System. He loved her so much he wanted to propose to her every day, and she wouldn’t even date him. She didn’t know if she loved him. She knew that they wouldn’t be good for each other. 

But Jon and Martin clearly weren’t that good for each other either. Or maybe Martin was very good for Jon, and Jon was terrible for Martin. Or maybe Sasha just didn’t understand anything, anything at all, much less the strange and obscure affection of two strange and obscure people. 

Sasha couldn’t help but feel as if the future held a great deal of dangerous uncertainty, and that she needed everyone on her side she could get. That she needed all of the happiness she could get. To hold herself back from something good now just because it could go sour in the future...well, what didn’t?

There was no happy ending. Not for her, and not for anyone. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she did. There was no use in being afraid of it. She knew that this would be a story with a disappointing ending. 

“Tim,” Sasha whispered into the cold and uncertain night, “if you promise not to brag about it at work tomorrow...you can take me on a date.”

“Oh, _fuck yeah,_ we’re going fucking _bowling_ -”

And things were okay. For tonight. 

  
  
  
  
  


Daisy Tonner was a creepy, awful little psychopath, and Sasha hated her.

The only redeeming thing about her was the fact that she seemed to hate Jon as much as the rest of them did. Apparently she didn’t even know anything about him. It had just been sheer, hate on sight energy, from the minute she walked inside the Institute to investigate Gertrude’s murder and Jon had sneered something about pigs chasing their own curly tails. 

Only Jon’s status as scion of a family half a step away from peerage had protected him, and even then Sasha could see in the curl of Tonner’s sneer that it wouldn’t hold for long. It was a real instant fuck you type deal which surprised Sasha absolutely none. People like Tonner never really liked people like Jon. To be fair, nobody liked Jon. Not even his friends. 

The interview in Sasha’s office was a joke, but that was better than the alternative. Tonner ran through basic questions, where-were-yous and how-did-you-know-the-deceased and so-I-heard-you-were-friends. Sasha spent the entire time quietly sweating, hoping that Tonner hadn’t done _too_ deep a dive into her background. There wasn’t anything in her past that would fuck her over if Tonner found her out, but there were plenty of details an authoritarian cis white woman might not like. Sasha couldn’t afford any attention right now. 

“Don’t leave town,” Tonner said curtly, flipping her notebook shut and standing up from her chair. “My partner or I will call you later.”

“I’m not seriously a suspect,” Sasha said incredulously. “I have an alibi backwards and forwards. Gertrude was a _friend_ of mine.”

“Everyone’s a suspect, you had the most to gain, and the majority of homicides are done by close friends, family members, or intimate partners,” Tonner rattled off, bored and monotone. Sasha could tell that her mind was far away, her eyes slightly unfocused, something in that mind tearing apart something Sasha hadn’t even seen. “What do you know about Sims?”

Sasha’s first instinct was to bristle, and her second was to suppress the reaction. Even if he was a right blackmailing immortal bastard who was on the short list of Sasha’s _own_ suspects, she wasn’t a snitch. “He’s just my boss. Eton wash-up. Nothing exciting about him. What about him?”

But Tonner just grunted. “Something’s not right about him.”

“Can’t imagine what _that_ must be,” Sasha muttered under her breath, and Tonner’s eyes locked in on Sasha. Good hearing. But Sasha met her eyes, and set her jaw. Tonner knew more than she was letting on, and despite everything Sasha still barely knew anything about Jon. He was too dangerous to be left a mystery. Martin, who knew Jon better than any of them, hadn’t doubted for a second that Jon would kill him. If Jon would do that to his friend, what would he have done to Gertrude? “What’s suspicious about him?”

“His eyes aren’t human,” Daisy said immediately. “There’s nothing in ‘em. Just radioactive waste. I know a monster when I see one. What’s in his eyes I’ve only seen one other time. When I look in the mirror. Reminds me of that godforsaken coffin.”

Sasha leaned forward, and she just barely wondered what was in her own eyes. “What coffin?”

And Detective Daisy Tonner told her. Then she threatened to kill her.

Two minutes after Tonner stormed out, snarling, Tim poked his head in to see Sasha sitting at her desk, feeling dazed and bloated. He looked at her for a second, seeing - maybe seeing what Tonner had seen, maybe just seeing Sasha. He stepped inside and shut the door, muting the soft sounds of Martin talking on the phone to someone. 

“You okay?” Tim asked. 

Bowling had gone well. So had the night after. Martin seemed happy for them, happy to see them walking into the office holding hands. He made her coffee in the mornings and reminded her to go to bed before four am at night. Tim was warm, and solid, and good, and he always had been. 

It just made Sasha more scared. But most things did, these days. 

Sasha groaned, kneading her forehead. “You have shit taste in friends.”

“Hey, I’m only buddies with her partner.” Tim walked over and sat on her desk, reaching over to give her a light massage on her shoulders. Sasha grunted in gratitude, letting her hair fall over her shoulders. “Did you know they’re, like, in complete lesbians with each other? It’s hilarious.”

“Wow, the pig’s a lesbian. Gay rights. Cops now welcome at pride. JK Rowling is crying pearly tears.”

“I am like...sixty percent sure Daisy’s not a TERF. But stop getting me off topic.” Tim pressed down into a knot on her shoulder. “What did you say to Daisy to spook her so bad? She looked terrified coming out of here.”

That wasn’t what Sasha had seen, but out of the two of them Tim was the people person. Sasha tended to prefer computers to people. They actually did what she wanted. 

“I don’t know,” Sasha said, strangely defensive. “We just talked. She gave a Statement. Tonner’s mad fucked up, but that’s no surprise. Nothing unusual.”

“Not unusual for here is everyone else’s definition of nutters.” Tim’s hands pressed a little more firmly into her neck. “Why did she give a statement?”

“I asked? Why not. People like giving Statements.” Sasha found herself hunching her shoulders again. “It’s cathartic or something.” The warm press of Tim’s hands disappeared, and Sasha turned around to see Tim frowning down at her. “What?”

“You whammied her,” Tim said, “didn’t you?”

“What? No I didn’t.” Sasha frowned at Tim, feeling something scratchy and uncomfortable in her chest. “I would have noticed.”

“Would you?”

She didn’t say anything. 

“This has to stop, Sash. Before it gets too far.” Tim hopped off the desk, standing in front of it and frowning at Sasha. She wondered if he was looking for something in her eyes - a hint of green? A shallow pool? Could that happen? Would she notice if it did? “I’m not going to let this happen to you.”

“I’m not sure you have much of a choice,” Sasha said, impossibly tired, impossibly old. “Get back to work, Tim.”

“Sasha -”

“Please.”

Tim left, unhappily. Sasha sat in her chair, unhappily. 

When Sasha left the building that day, far earlier than she normally did so she could drink away her problems at her favorite pub alone, she saw Jon and Martin sitting on a bench talking to each other outside the building. Their heads were bent towards each other, seemingly deep in conversation, sometimes nodding along to what the other person was saying. Jon said something, and Martin laughed uproariously at it. 

There was a strange twisting in Sasha’s gut, and she didn’t know why. How could Martin just _hang out_ with him when he was probably a killer and definitely more than two hundred years old? He was a creep. He was a vampire. He ate trauma. He was -

Sasha was scared of him. 

She was no stranger to fear. She would freely admit to being a bit of a coward sometimes, really. But Sasha knew her own competence, knew her own strength, and she never let upstart jerks get to her. No matter how creepy and powerful they were. 

But in Jon...she saw something. She was afraid it was herself. 

Tim was right. She had accidentally whammied Tonner. She couldn’t quite work up the energy to feel guilty or sick over it, because Tonner was an asshole. But how long until she did it to Martin again, or Tim? How long before she went too far?

Whatever was happening...Jon knew what it was. Which meant that maybe he knew how to make it stop.

She didn’t even realize she was walking towards the two until she was standing in front of them. Martin was the first to notice her, perennially twitchy, and he smiled awkwardly at her until Jon registered her existence. 

Despite the drama over Martin’s near death experience she hadn’t exactly confronted him about what Martin told her. In fact, she pretty rarely purposefully spoke to him at all. Jonathan Sims as an inconvenient figure in her life, but one with weight. Everything seemed to warp around him, bending themselves into knots over his mystery, but actually standing in front of him was strangely overwhelming and scary, and she rejected it. 

So, she hadn’t exactly walked up to him and went, ‘I know you’re an immortal psychic vampire who’s slowly turning me into one of you and I need to know how to stop it’, because that was a stupid fucking sentence to say out loud and probably a signifier that her life was so far gone down the toilet that that it wasn’t worth fishing out. 

“I know you’re an immortal psychic vampire who’s slowly turning me into one of you and I need to know how to stop it,” Sasha said. 

Jon blinked at her. Martin face palmed. Finally, Jon hesitantly offered, “I’m not _actually_ a vampire.”

“Then why are you immortal?” Sasha demanded. 

“You know how some people pray to God for a new truck? It’s like that.”

“I genuinely don’t know what I see in you,” Martin mumbled into his palms.

“Can I talk to you?” Sasha said, pained beyond measure. “In private?”

Both men in front of her looked shocked - Martin, likely because he knew Sasha would rather die than voluntarily interact with Jon, and Jon because women who were alone with him usually turned up on milk cartons the next day and he was wildly aware of that. 

But after Martin whispered in his ear for a few more seconds, Jon ended up nodding solemnly. “Let me take you out to dinner.” He squeezed Martin’s hand tightly and casually, as if it was something that they did all the time. “Killing Eve later?”

“Oh, yes! I still have to show you the soul mate fanfic I wr - I mean, yeah, I have fun.” Martin waved awkwardly, and Jon awkwardly waved back. “Bye.”

“Bye,” Jon said, and Sasha mentally revised their relationship status from _Martin has the most unfortunate crush of all time_ to _they’re lesbians, Harold._

The restaurant Jon had in mind was a short distance from the Institute - no surprise, knowing Chelsea. Jon navigated the crowds with ease, darting back and forth between crowds and keeping his leather loafers free of grates and cigarette butts, and Sasha had to work to keep up with him. She couldn’t help but notice how, unlike most London denizens, Jon always kept his head up and looking around. Always alert, like a tourist drinking in the rich and decadent sights of the big city. Maybe he was. 

“How long have you been living in London?” Sasha asked, feeling like a fucking idiot making small talk with a B-movie monster. 

“Oh, I forget, really. If I was born 1800, which I think we decided on at one point...some scattered work trips across the world for a few months every decade or so…” Jon nimbly stepped over a dead pigeon. “...I left for America to get my work done around the Blitz, country hopped some more, came back a few weeks before I met you...one hundred thirty years, I’d say? Give or take a few years.”

Sasha’s jaw dropped, stunned into silence. Jon glanced at her, surprised by her reaction. 

“I’m sorry, Martin _did_ confirm my history?” Jon asked. 

“Yeah, I just...didn’t expect you to just...say it.” Sasha tucked her hands in her coat pockets uncomfortably, shivering in the cold air. December had come in harsh this year, and she never bundled up right. “Or what it meant. Christ, it’s freezing.”

“It changes every time I see it.” Jon shucked his large and heavy wool greatcoat as he was walking, and without asking he easily slid it over her shoulders. She stiffened, every nerve alight, but once her reflexes assured her it was just a fancy London Fog greatcoat, she slid her arms into the sleeves and buttoned it tight. It was massively warm. Old timey gentleman, huh? “The city’s the oldest friend I have. Every time I look outside, I see more and more of its million faces die and wither away. Something new grows in their place, of course, new sprouts from the fertilizer of the corpses of the buildings that came before. Change tends to be celebrated by one side, tradition by the other, but it’s all meaningless. London is London is London.” He huffed as they walked, seemingly unperturbed by the cold. “My ex-wife says I should try harder to keep up with the times. I don’t understand the point of keeping track of all the new little fads that are always popping up. As if it’ll ever be important to _me_ what a telephone is.”

“...did Martin teach you what television was?” Sasha asked despairingly. 

“Yes, he was very excited to do so.” Jon glanced back at her, raising an eyebrow. “You and Georgie would get along, I believe. She likes people like you.” He paused contemplatively. “That or she’d eat you. But I think she’d like you too much.”

“...is your ex-wife _also a vam_ -”

“You’ll find out soon. Here we are.” 

Jon halted in front of a building, and Sasha skittered to a stop next to him. She had been expecting a ridiculously fancy restaurant, but instead what she saw was a cafe. The chalkboard sign proclaimed itself _Death’s Head Cafe_ , and the outside looked just like every other indie coffee shop/bakery/cafe in London, of which there was plenty. When Sasha poked her head in she saw a small front section, littered with circular tables and walls paneled by dark wood, with a long burnished wood bar boasting stainless steel espresso machines and a glass case full of pastries. It was reasonably full, college students and business workers clinging to the sides like barnacles. 

“Nice place,” Sasha said sarcastically. “Too many witnesses if you’re planning on murdering me, though.”

“No, that’s not in the cards for right now. Too much work to find someone new so soon.” Jon opened the door for her, and she stepped inside from out of the cold. 

But once he went inside, he didn’t aim for a table or for the bar. Jon kept walking, easily hopping the short gate over the counter and disappearing through an employee only entrance. Sasha hissed with fear and public decency, running over and leaning over the counter to try to get Jon to come back. 

“Sims!” Sasha hissed. “You can’t go into restricted areas just because you’re rich! Sims, come - oh, bugger it.”

She easily hopped the counter too, a youth misspent flashing behind her eyes, and she quickly disappeared through the door after him.

But what she found was not an employee break room, not a kitchen or a stockroom. Instead she only found dim lighting, wooden and cloth booths lit by stained glass overhang, and a steel bar manned by one short woman wiping a glass down with a clean rag. A laptop was open next to her, and she was cleaning the glass with one hand and typing away furiously at the laptop with the other. Jon was already walking towards the bar, sliding into a leather stool and getting the attention of the bartender. Sasha hurried after him, looking around the secret backstage pub frantically. It was abandoned, and she suddenly regretted making the murder joke now. 

When she cautiously approached the bar, she found herself interrupting a lively conversation between Sims and the bartender. He was smiling, small but real and effusive, and it transformed his face. 

“ - and he wants to watch Killing Eve with me tonight!”

“Oh, honey,” the woman said sympathetically. “This man’s going to break your heart so hard.”

“You’re so pessimistic. I’m capable of forming significant relationships with humans. I’m friends with...er…” Jon trailed off, before abruptly remembering Sasha existed. “Sasha James!”

“I hate your guts,” Sasha said. 

The bartender gave him a pitying look. “My advice? Get a prenup.”

“Should have gotten a prenup before marrying _you_ ,” Jon groused, and Sasha realized a start that the woman must be the famed Georgie Barker. 

She was short and curvy, with an undercut and natural hair. With darker skin than Jon, she was dressed casually in a t-shirt with the Punisher logo and expensive distressed jeans. The most ostentatious part of her outfit was the black lipstick and winged eyeliner, but what caught Sasha’s eye were her earrings. Two miniature jewel-encrusted skull earrings that jangled whenever she moved her head, rubies shining from metal eye sockets. 

So Jon’s ex-wife was a goth. Good...to know.

Georgie very obviously checked Sasha out, making her feel extremely self-conscious in Jon’s large greatcoat and her boring work pantsuit, but something about her seemed to pass muster because she leaned across the bar in a very flattering position and shined a toothy grin at Sasha.

“Darling, you never said that your new protege was such a _cutie_. She has that whole nerd thing going for her.” She put the glass down and jokingly made a picture frame with her fingers. “Oh, I’d definitely cast you as the sexy scientist who needs to invent the bomb that stops Godzilla. Or our new racially diverse Marion the Librarian in the 2017 remake of the Music Man.”

This was weird, but Sasha was having difficulty reconciling ‘try not to get eaten by my ex-wife’ and ‘do you have a kik?’. Maybe Jon meant metaphorically - but it didn’t seem like a bad break up. 

“Do you work in the entertainment industry?” Sasha asked finally, the small talk feeling strangely out of place yet again. Jon began ignoring them, gazing longingly up at the whiskey.

“Here and there!” Georgie laughed, as Jon stepped on top of the bar in order to angle his ridiculously long and spindly limbs to pluck down a bottle of top-shelf whiskey. He untwisted the cap, apparently ready to drink from the bottle, and without even looking Georgie slid him a glass to use instead. “Ah, I used to do some entertainment work in the ‘20s. Sang in a few Harlem nightclubs, tore a few jazz houses down, swung the night away. I’ve been moving in and out ever since. I have my fingers in a lot of pies, but my latest dish is podcasts. I just can’t get away from the spotlight!”

“Georgie does radio shows,” Jon said proudly.

“Yes, dear,” Georgie said, patting his hand as he downed a glass full of straight whiskey, “I do radio shows.” She turned back to Sasha, white teeth flashing in the dim yellow light. “What brings a butterfly like you into my Venus fly trap?”

“Ms. James wished to speak with me in a secure location,” Jon said, downing the rest of his whiskey and plucking the bottle off the table. “I’ll grab a corner booth for us. Send dinner in, won’t you, darling?”

Georgie smiled again, but something about it was far more dangerous than before. “Dinner for one or dinner for two?”

“I’m afraid Ms. James’ stomach is rather weak,” Jon said, pseudo-apologetically. “So dinner for one for tonight, I’m afraid.”

“Am I in Hannibal? I feel like I’m in fucking Hannibal,” Sasha said. 

“I’m afraid Martin hasn’t shown me that one yet,” Jon said seriously. “I can put it on the list, if you like.”

“You know what - no.” Sasha pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t want you to get any ideas.”

Soon enough, they were tucked into a corner. Sasha refused any drinks, even coffee or water, dim reminders of that one Haan statement ringing through her head. She was still wearing Jon’s coat. She didn’t know why she hadn’t taken it off yet. She should, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. 

“So,” Jon said, knocking back straight whiskey as if it was water, “what did you want to ask me about?”

A million questions burst into her head, and Sasha almost tripped over her own tongue in an effort to get them out. This was her opportunity to get real answers out of him, to get a real solution for her problems. He wasn’t even _asking_ for anything, he was just offering. It was almost suspicious. Whatever happened to secrecy?

Well, Martin had happened. And even if Jon’s secret had been big enough to risk Martin’s life, it hadn’t been enough for Jon to be actually careful. 

A picture of Jonathan Sims was slowly coming together. Careless, disaffected, removed. Insane, but not without meaningful connections or an understanding of politics and current events. No comprehension of life or death or television or humanity or fear, but apparently he _liked Martin back_.

And...he had an interest in her. A protege. An heir. Sasha huddled deeper inside the coat, trying not to be afraid of the lazy man sprawled carelessly on the vinyl booth chugging booze, failing.

This fear she was always feeling...it choked her. She didn’t used to be like this, snappish and desperate and falling down the bad decisions tree and hitting every branch on the way down. She felt as if she was becoming a worse person. She didn’t like it. 

“What’s happening to me?” Sasha asked, one of two questions with answers she actually cared about. 

“You’re _becoming_ ,” Jon said mysteriously and empathetically, as if he was the wise mentor in the fantasy movie, before knocking back more whiskey. 

She waited patiently for him to say something helpful. 

“Becoming...what?”

“Oh.” Jon squinted, before digging in a pocket and pulling out a creased piece of notebook paper. He squinted at it. “Let me check to see if the Director told me I was allowed to disclose that.”

“Holy shit.”

“Eh, I’m sure it’s fine.” Jon crumpled the paper, dropping it on the table. “Do you know what I am?”

“I’m guessing it’s not a psychic vampire.”

From across the pub, Georgie barked a laugh. “Are the vampire rumors going around again? Don’t let Trevor know!”

“Silence, goth.” Jon half-shrugged, tracing a finger around the rim of his glass. “My official title, under my god, is Archivist. I’m occasionally called the Archive by...some...but only when they particularly feel like treating me like an object.” Jon rolled his eyes, sipping from his glass again. “Ponce.” 

He only ever talked about one person with that tone. “So Elias is in on it, then?”

“Who?” Jon asked, disinterestedly. 

“Jon,” Georgie called warningly. 

“What? Oh, yes, of course.” Jon shrugged. “Elias is aware of my nature, yes. I’ve always had a...particular relationship with the head of the Magnus Institute. Yin and yang, you know.” He poured a little whiskey on the table, heedless of stains, and drew the Tao symbol in the amber liquid. “Mountain and shadow. Dark and light. Head and heart. He is the beating heart, and I’m its inquisitive mind. I’ve always worked better in the shadows. It was the only way I could truly get anything done, in the early days, and then I grew to prefer it.” He shrugged again, looking away. “I grew to prefer a lot of things which I was forced into.”

“Which is why you’re a ghost on paper,” Sasha said slowly. “You do work...for your god...on national governments...what does this have to do with being an Archivist?”

Wasn’t _she_ the Archivist? Is this what Jon meant, by heir? By protege?

“What do you archive, Ms. James?” Jon asked patiently. 

Sasha fought the urge to shift uncomfortably. “Statements. Ghost stories, campfire tales. Experiences, I guess.”

“What kind of experiences?”

“Scary ones?”

Jon snapped his fingers. “Fear. That’s the root. You archive fear, Ms. James. Forgive me if I’m explaining a bit sloppily, I’ve never actually _had_ to explain this before. It would be easier if…” Jon quickly grabbed the paper and uncrumpled it, reading it over again. “Drat. Well, for the time being, just understand that you archive fear. I am a repository of fear. It is what I consume. It sustains me. In exchange for the sacrifices I make to my god, I am granted certain privileges. As are you.”

Sasha’s spine prickled. “The whammy.”

“Is that what you call it?” Jon asked, interestedly. “You’re progressing faster than expected, strangely enough. It’s the first time I’ve stuck around in person to supervise the process, so perhaps that can be attributed.”

“Can you do it? The whammy?”

“Naturally. I suspect your powers will develop to take a different shape than mine - you are _very_ good with computers, Ms. James - but being able to draw an experience out of someone is necessary for feeding. It’s the claws and fangs we use to hunt.” He leaned back in his seat. “I believe an example is coming now. Take a look.”

Sasha twisted around to see the door, which was swinging open. A young woman stood at the door, college aged with a big backpack and a thick coat and scarf, and she was curiously looking around the pub. 

How had she even found the place? It was hidden in the back, you couldn’t just wander in here. Sasha wanted to yell at her to leave, to get out, but she was frozen to her seat. She felt like a deer, frozen to stillness on the highway, watching the glowing yellow eyes of the beast encroaching on her growing closer and closer. 

“Welcome in,” Georgie called cheerfully. “We have an on the house special for new visitors. Talk to my associate to get your free mug!”

The girl wandered closer to their table, her blonde hair long and silky, and Sasha wanted to scream. Jon smiled at the newcomer, straightening, his fluorescent green eyes taking in a sharp focus where they had previously been lazily drifting about the room. 

“It is so good to meet you, Ms. Edwards. I believe there was something you wanted to tell us? In exchange for your mug, of course.”

Sasha felt it: the crackle. The status, the harsh buzzing in her ears. Like a tape recorder, whirling away as it ate and ate and ate. The girl opened her mouth, and didn’t even hesitate as her story began spilling out. As if she had expected this to happen, as if there had never been any escape from the first moment she walked in. 

There hadn’t been. Sasha watched in mute horror as the girl began shaking, then crying, unable to stop giving her story. It was fascinating, a tale of bugs and rot and encroaching filth, and a part of it was satisfying. But it was mostly disgusting, the filth of the girl’s tale crawling into Sasha’s own lungs and making bile rise in her throat. She was scared, as scared as Sasha was, and she was just _sitting_ here. 

Jon languidly slouched in his seat, eyes closed, fingers occasionally jerking, and Sasha realized for the first time that he did not breathe. 

Finally, the girl finished, gasping sobs, and Jon flicked his fingers in dismissal. The girl left, still shaking, and Georgie cheerfully gave the girl a free mug filled with coffee before leaning over and whispering something in her ear. 

It wasn’t until the girl had left that Sasha felt like she could breathe again, that her strings were cut and she could move. She shuddered and gasped, fighting down bile, disgust crawling over every inch of her skin. Disgust at Jon, disgust at Georgie, disgust over the Statement, disgust at herself…

“That’s what you’re turning me into,” Sasha gasped. “Someone who does that to people. For - for _fun_.”

“I do it to survive,” Jon said, somewhat offended. “Do you eat for fun?”

“And if you have to do it to survive,” Georgie said, throwing a dishtowel over her shoulder, “why not enjoy the show?”

Eat. Eat, lunch, dinner, appetite, hunger. A thousand conversations clicked into place. A thousand _Statements_ clicked into place. 

“The entire Institute,” Sasha whispered, “it’s a mill. It’s a slaughterhouse. To feed _you_.”

“Nowadays, mostly,” Jon said, shrugging, as if the lives of over a hundred employees existing only to give him _brunch_ was a minor footnote in his life, “but it has its own role for the Director. Jonah and I founded it for - well, many reasons, but I suppose you could say that even as humans we had been collectors of fear. Information, at first, secrets. But then...yes, fear.” His eyes went a little distant, almost a little far away. “That’s how I made my fortune at first, you know. All servants traded secrets. Scullery maids knew who was bedding who, stewards knew who was skimming from the top. It was a common currency, the trading and bartering of information. But I grew...ah, I grew a bit obsessed. I had to _know_. Who was bedding who, who was in business deals with who, what were the mysteries of those distant lands of India and the Orient. How to read, how to write. How to arrange numbers in a way that made sense. How to have people respect you, to listen when you talked. Everything that Jonah knew so effortlessly, I had to scrape and beg and steal.”

His voice quieted, and Sasha wondered if he was still talking to her. If there was a long-dead person, a disappointed grandmother, who Jon was still trying to explain himself to.

“I stole it all. And eventually I realized that I knew how to take it by force. What they would never give me, no matter how hard I worked or how brilliant I was, I would take. It was only fair.” Jon shrugged absently, sipping more from his glass. “I just wanted things to be fair.”

“So - what? What?” Sasha found herself speaking louder than intended, and Jon was looking at her with alarm, but she couldn’t make herself quiet down. “You’re bitter over what some old fucks did to you _two hundred_ years ago, so now you take it out on their descendents? So now you do it to _me_? What did I ever do to you!”

Jon met her eyes, his radioactive green meeting hers, and Sasha found herself locked in place. A prey, facing down a predator. Terrified, of the lazy and childish immortal. 

“Do not speak of things you do not understand,” Jon said clearly and slowly, “or I will make you understand. And you don’t want that. There is a depth of human depravity, of fear and cruelty, that a child like you cannot comprehend. If you had seen what I’ve seen in my two hundred years, you would want this sordid country burned to the ground too.” His hand clenched around his glass, and Sasha almost felt the motion in her heart. “I have been the victim, Sasha James. I will not act the victim again. In this world, that means that I must become the victimizer. I’ve made that choice, and I’ve reaped its rewards. I would make the same choice again, every time.”

“Do you really think the world is that evil?” Sasha said, mouth dry. “That everything can be reduced down to power?”

Jon shrugged, finishing his drink. “Yes. The world is an evil and cruel place. That’s why I’m going to fix it.”

“Fix - _how_?”

“Hm. Hold on.” Jon consulted his list. “Nope, that was underlined five times. Can’t say.” He stood up, steady and fluid despite having consumed half the bottle of whiskey. “I’m bored. I answered your questions, I believe.”

“Oh, no, I have _so_ many more questions -”

“You’ve a beautiful and exceptional woman, Sasha James, but I fear you won’t become an interesting conversationalist until I’m allowed to tell you a few more things. Good talk, though, I’m glad we’re friends now.” He pointed at her, gesturing empathetically to an amused Georgie tapping away at her laptop. “I have human friends, Georgie!”

“Not for long,” Georgie sang. 

“How do I stop what’s happening to me!” Sasha burst out, bolting upright. “How do I stop this! How do I stop myself from turning into _you_!”

Jon blinked at her, as if surprised by the question. As if surprised by the fact that somebody wouldn’t want to be him, wouldn’t want to serve his weird god, wouldn’t want to own infinite power. 

Immortality, wealth, and power...who would turn it down? All you had to sell was your soul. Sasha was already signed up on the fast track plan, direct route express towards Hell, no stops! Why not, apparently!

But she didn’t want it. There were lots of great reasons not to do it - morality, ethics, being evil, etc - but what she kept on getting stuck on, what she couldn’t get past, was something stupid. 

Tim would _kill_ her. He’d be so disappointed. 

Why did that matter? What did Tim’s opinions have to do with anything?

But they did. Tim was more than her bad decision, he was her friend. He was almost everything she had. When she had nothing, when she was alone, she had him. He wasn’t her world, but he was her rock and she was his. She already felt like she was losing him to this horror and pain, how could she voluntarily become a part of it? 

She didn’t want to be someone who caused people she loved pain. She didn’t want to be someone who caused pain and didn’t _care_. It wasn’t worth it. You didn’t have to hurt people to survive. Sasha believed that. She had to. 

“Uh…” Jon trailed off uncertainly, before picking up the paper again. “Let me check what Elias said -”

“Bugger Elias!” Sasha screamed, and Jon blinked in surprise. “What, is he the fucking boss of you? Why are you doing everything _he_ says? Think for your fucking self!”

Jon...paled. It made his eyes stand out even more strangely, but the expression itself settled strangely on his face. This wasn’t a man who was scared very frequently, but he was scared now. “The Director doesn’t tell me what to do,” he protested weakly. “I’m the right hand of god. What authority does he have over me?”

“Then why do you have to _check_ with him before you do anything?” Sasha snapped. “If you’re not his fucking lapdog, act like it and think for yourself. Or is that too much work?”

“Ms. James.” 

It was Georgie, who had suddenly appeared at Sasha’s side. For the first time she looked somewhat serious, mouth set in a firm line. She put a cold hand on Sasha’s shoulder, and gently pulled her back. She was looking at Jon, who - who -

“It’s best if you leave now,” Georgie said. “Come on, you can talk again at work.”

She efficiently turned Sasha around and steered her out the door. Before Sasha knew it, she was standing at the doorway of the cafe, ripped from one world and deposited uncertainly into another. Georgie seemed different, standing on the crowded London streets. She could have been anyone, a hip young woman striding down London pavement in the latest style, instead of someone with her thumbprints in every channel of history. Jon could have been normal, just another overly tall and overly skinny man slouching his way from place to place, if it wasn’t for the fact that Sasha had recognized him the first moment she saw him.

Whatever was in Jon, whatever evil and corruption and need to _know_ , was in her too. There was something painfully and disgustingly similar in them, as if he had contaminated her, as if she had always been this way and Jon had brought it to the forefront. 

“Can I give you some advice, dear?” Georgie said. 

“Do you kill people too?” Sasha asked, exhausted. “Because if you do, the answer is no.”

But Georgie just looked surprised, as if it was a silly question. “People die without my help just fine. Why would I kill them?”

That...that just raised so many further questions. What she said meant something, Sasha knew it, and it had something to do with the punisher logo and the skull earrings and the Death’s Head Cafe, but Sasha didn’t know what. Did it _mean_ anything that Jon’s ex-wife was a goth? Probably not.

But...she had thought that Jon’s endless whining about food and eating was meaningless too. That his endless sniping fights with Elias were white noise. Sasha had been playing detective, chasing down the mystery, but the clues have been in front of her face the entire time and she just hadn’t been _looking_. 

She couldn’t afford to be complacent. She couldn’t afford to be weak, to be tempted, to be afraid.

If Jon - if Georgie, if _Sasha_ \- ate fear...then Sasha just wouldn’t be afraid anymore. She would cut it out of herself. Deaden herself. Burn it away. Be strong.

What choice did she have?

“What’s your advice?” Sasha asked warily. 

Georgie tilted her head, earrings glinted, and for the first time Sasha properly saw her eyes in full. They were black. No, not black. They were nothing. They were void. 

“You have people you want to protect, right?” Georgie asked, and she must have seen something in Sasha’s face, because she smiled. “I thought so. Jon wouldn’t have been able to see it - he’s never really thought about anyone in terms of _protect_. At least...historically.” She pursed her lips briefly, before pasting the smile back on. “But you have people you care about. People you’d die to save. Right?”

Sasha nodded dumbly. 

“Power can be more than a selfish thing,” Georgie said gently. “It can be the one thing that keeps everybody and everything we care about safe. The people and places you love are in danger, Sasha James. It’s time to make a choice on what you’ll do to protect them.” She tilted her head slightly, an alien motion. “There are worse things than death. I would know. Loving someone enough to die for them is all fine and sweet, but you’ll find that it is much more difficult to love someone enough to stay alive for them.”

She shot a final wink at Sasha and turned around, striding back into the cafe and the horrors that lay underneath. It was still full, rimmed by red-eyed students and tired humans, who had no idea what swam underneath their feet. 

Sasha was like them, once. She never would be again.

“Oh, and dear?” Georgie looked back, smiling sweetly at Sasha. “Jon can be very difficult, but he’s been through a great deal. Have some patience for him. His heart’s been shattered too many times, and neither Elias nor I remember enough of hearts to glue it back together.” Something in her endless gaze sharpened. “Don’t hurt Jon’s feelings again. Or you’ll find out what horrors lay far beyond the absolution of death. Toodles!”

She shut the door behind her, and Sasha was left alone in the cold, clutching the wool greatcoat tightly. She had forgotten to give it back. 

  
  
  
  


Somehow, some way, she ended up at Tim’s door. 

She didn’t remember knocking, but she remembered the look on Tim’s face: confusion, fear, and recognition. She didn’t know what was on her own face. Desolation? Despair? 

Slowly, almost afraid, his eyes trailed down to the coat, which she was still desperately clinging to, and his expression darkened in recognition. 

“What,” Tim said slowly, “did he do?”

“Just let me in,” Sasha said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

And she didn’t. Other than assuring Tim that Jon hadn’t hurt her, that all they had done was talk, she didn’t say anything. She took a very, very hot shower instead, shamelessly using up all of Tim’s hot water, dissociating heavily, trying to wrangle her world into a new framework. 

What did she know?

She knew that Tim was in love with her, and that if he knew what was happening it would break him one way or another. Did she hide what she was becoming from him? No, he already knew. Did she tell him about the terrifying hints Jon had obliquely dropped, promises of a becoming and a transformation and a new world?

No. Tim would kill for her. She didn’t want to know what would happen to Tim, if he decided Jon was too dangerous to be left alive.

It was so stupid. In order to protect Tim, she had to protect Jon. She was increasingly certain Jon or Elias were the ones who had killed Gertrude - an investment that hadn’t paid off, a puppet no longer willing to dance on their strings - but seeing as they didn’t seem to have any intention of killing her yet, she didn’t really care. 

But Tim was obsessed. He wouldn’t listen to her if she told him to drop it. Well...that investigation would keep him busy, and distracted from the real issue. That was fine.

What would she do, to keep Tim safe?

He was in danger. That much was already abundantly clear. Sasha knew that it would only get more dangerous from here on out, and Tim couldn’t rely on Jon to get him out of a tough spot like she had in the past. She wasn’t even really sure Jon knew Tim’s name. It would have to be up to her. Would she become a monster, if it gave her power to keep Tim safe?

If she was a good person, the answer would be yes without question. Do anything, for the guy she...cared about. Loved, if not in love. Her friend. Her boyfriend, probably.

Tim would do it for her. Ever since Danny, his hero complex had grown out of control. He obsessed, every moment, with how he could hold tight to the people he cared about. If anything happened to Sasha, if she had died on what he saw as ‘his watch’, then he just wouldn’t want to live anymore. Sasha knew it. Tim did too. 

But Sasha...she could live without Tim. Just fine. 

If that made her a bad person…

Was Jon a bad person?

At once, something very severe hit Sasha on the head, and she groaned, burying her fingers in her hair. 

She got out of the shower, towelling off and grabbing her phone as Tim sat on his couch arranging what looked like cassettes. She quickly texted Martin, the first non-work related text she had ever sent him. 

**Sasha:** hey r u hip on jon backstory

Martin took a while to reply, and Sasha anxiously heated up some of Tim’s leftover take-out as she fought the creeping sense that Tim was leafing through old cassettes with labels written in a spindly, flowering hand. She didn’t want to ask. She didn’t want to _know_. She was off work, and she wasn’t going to worry about -

 **Martin:** omfg WHAT did you say to him  
 **Martin:** is this why hes so upset??? We’re watching Hallmark films

 **Martin:** we ONLY ever watch Hallmark when he’s upset

 **Sasha:** wtf upsets evil vampire pope

 **Martin:** besides ppl acting shitty about his tragic backstory?!?!

 **Martin:** ascpa commercials.

Sasha groaned. 

It was stupid to feel guilty. Jon was the one who should feel guilty for being an evil trauma Cookie Monster. He was, objectively, a bad person. Or at the very least a complicated person, who did bad things. 

Sasha wouldn’t become a monster to save someone else’s life. But if it was in revenge, to save her own life, to strike back against those that had stolen everything from her…

She didn’t know. Sasha understood, as best as she could - her life hadn’t exactly been easy either - but she could never know what it had been like. Was it her place to judge?

But that wasn’t what had upset him. It has been the insinuation that Elias controlled him, that Jon was not the master of his own destiny. 

That made sense. Jon, it seemed, had killed his human heart to become master of his own fate. But his reaction...it had been more personal than that. 

Whispers drifted through Sasha’s mind. An ‘old friend’ baptizing him, Jonah Magnus teaching him to read and write...had she hit a nerve two hundred years old? But what did that have to do with Elias?

...Jonah Magnus and Elias Bouchard weren’t identical, like Jon Sims the first and Jon Sims the fifth. They _weren’t_. Right?

Whatever. This was none of her business. This was Martin’s job, actually, riding the Jon redemption train towards the big rock candy mountain. Sasha got the job done. Puzzling out the psychology of a two hundred year old trauma victim and fear vampire was _not_ in her job description. She didn’t even care -

“Sash. Come take a look at these.” Tim looked up at her, expression set. “I think you’ll want to hear them.”

Sasha sighed, moving over to sit next to him as she polished off his takeout. “Statements? Can’t they wait for work?”

“You won’t want to listen to these during work,” Tim said darkly. “They’re the statements Basira’s been slipping me. I think they’re the key to figuring out who killed Gerturde. And…”

Tim hesitated, falling silent. Sasha elbowed him. “And?”

“And some of them are about the circus,” Tim whispered. 

Sasha sobered. Tim needed this from her. This, at least, she could give. “Pop them in. Let’s give them a shot.”

Some date night. But, even as they listened to horrors untold beyond imagining, Sasha curled up against Tim’s side in the bathrobe she had begun stashing at his flat, letting his arm wrap around her shoulders, reminding him that she was still there. She wouldn’t leave. She could promise that to him. 

No matter the cost. 

  
  


The next day Sasha got stabbed through the hand, which did _not_ make Tim less anxious. 

It was her own fault, really. Helen Richardson was trouble, and Sasha should have never let her in her office. But there was just something so demented in her soft olive eyes, something twisting and distorted, and in that funhouse mirror of Helen’s desperate expression Sasha saw herself.

That was what the Spiral was best at: twisting deceit. Showing your reflection in a ripple, and luring you closer to snap its jaws shut. It was a predator, like Jon, and its prey was the sanity of humans.

Sasha would know. She was, after all, friends with Michael.

It hadn’t been on purpose.

“You believe me, don’t you?” Helen Richardson had said, voice quaking and desperate. She wasn’t quite crying - too proud for that, Sasha suspected, or too numb - but her right eye wouldn’t stop twitching, and her left hand wouldn’t stop tracing the golden ratio on Sasha’s desk. Her nail scratched the desk in an unceasing curve as her hand traced the motions, an awful skittering and scraping that Helen seemed unaware of. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

To save her desk, and Helen Richardson’s hand, Sasha grabbed her hand and smiled tightly, trying to project as much safety and reassurance as possible in her own brown eyes. “I do. I know what happened to you, Ms. Richardson. It wasn’t your fault.”

It was only then that Helen Richardson stifled a sharp sob, more of an exhalation of relief than a desperate cry. “Wh - what was it? What were those hallways?”

“It was a...monster.” Sasha gripped Helen Richardson’s hand tighter, trying to anchor her down. “I’m afraid that monsters are real, and that you were trapped by one. They...eat people, or they eat the fear of people.” She only realized it as she was saying it, how alike Jon and Michael truly were. Maybe they were the same, in their own weird and demented way. Was the Spiral that Michael talked about so frequently the same phenomenon as Jon’s god? “But you’re safe now. You’re out of there. It’s all over now.”

“Is it?” Helen Richardson whispered. “My mind, it’s bent. I feel twisted. Something in me is wrong.”

“I feel that way all the time,” Sasha said desperately. “That’s normal! You’ve been through something really traumatic, Helen.” She gently extricated her hands from Helen’s, wheeling backwards in her chair and picking out a business card for a therapist from a rapidly dwindling stack. She passed it to Helen, who crumpled it so tightly in her hands that it creased. “There’s people you can talk to. They might not believe you, but they will help you work through this. Your life will go back to normal, and you can go back to your life. I promise. We’ll investigate this, Ms. Richardson, I promise.”

Helen Richardson stared blankly at the card, eyes unfocused, before looking at Sasha. She stood up slowly, hands trembling, eyes wild and afraid. “You don’t believe me.”

“I do,” Sasha said soothingly, “I know that something preyed on you. Trust me, I - I know how it feels. But I promise that you’re still you. You’re more than what that monster did to you. You can get through this, Ms. Richardson. There’s another side.”

“There’s not,” Helen Richardson whispered. “There’s billions of sides and every side is split into fractal, infinite patterns, and you can walk through them for years and never see its shadowy face. I’m lost. You - thank you, Ms. James, I won’t waste any more of your time.”

“No, Ms. Richardson, please -”

But Helen Richardson had always started hiding her face, keeping the tears back, and she was not even looking up when she turned around and left through the first door that she found. 

A bright yellow, crazed, warped door - a door that Sasha had seen, but that Helen had been too consumed to notice.

She disappeared through the door, Sasha calling her name, and Sasha knew that she would never see her again. Catch and release. So much more made sense now. The point was not their lives, not just to feed or consume. The point was cruelty and fear. What was crueller than giving someone the light at the end of the tunnel, only to find that light guiding the way into the fish’s mouth? Did the little bit of a hope sweeten the meal?

Sasha sat there, in silence, tape recorder running. She stared at it desperately. She had heard Helen Richardson’s last words, and they were captured on immutable tape. It was weirdly beautiful, in its own way. How something so ephemeral and impermanent was now forever, so long as you didn’t let it get close to a particularly strong magnet, and how Sasha had heard it. 

It was knowledge that was hers now. Only hers. Somehow that made it more valuable, that it was private and secret, that Helen Richardson had spilled the ugly contents of her soul onto Sasha’s desk. It made it better.

Slowly, achingly, Sasha’s hand reached out to pause the tape. She almost didn’t -

“My, is she hard on the digestion.”

Sasha’s head jerked up, breath catching and heart jumping into her throat. Of course, of fucking course, a tall and skeletal figure loomed pleasantly against the far wall. With angelic curly blonde ringlets falling to its shoulders, a smile that hurt like lost love, and a glint in its eyes like the sunlight spiralling off water droplets into a thousand colors, Michael existed half-heartedly and overwhelmingly in Sasha’s office. Suddenly, but unsurprisingly.

Without even thinking about it, Sasha reached out a hand and grabbed the first thing her hand brushed - a heavy metal stapler - before chucking it at Michael’s head. Michael wheezed in laughter, not so much dodging as moving the world fifteen degrees to the left and letting the stapler thunk heavily into the wall. 

“Strange gratitude, Archivist! Did you not enjoy your meal? We thought we were doing you a favor.” Michael tittered a laugh like iron nails in a garbage disposal. “It’s just delivery.”

“Bullshit!” Sasha barked. You couldn’t show weakness in front of Michael. You had to be confident, but flexible. Never show uncertainty or fear. It was what it wanted. It was an MO that Sasha had been trying to implement in every sphere of her life. “I didn’t _ask_ you to - I wasn’t _eating_ her, dickhead!”

“Intelligent of you!” Michael frowned like a paper cut. “I am having difficulty digesting her. I think I shall allow her to stew. We can be patient, I believe. Do you want to get drinks?”

“We’re not friends, asshole!” Sasha grabbed the closest projectile again- the tape recorder, still whirling away, and chucked it at Michael’s head. It dodged with its body, this time chuckling, and Sasha furiously churned her fear into anger. The tape recorder hit the ground, but the cassette didn’t pop out. “I don’t care how many times you stalk me and say you’re trying to help me, we’re not actually friends!”

“We aren’t separate, Archivist.” Michael walked forward, so much as forward applied to it, so much as it moved its body through space. It was wearing a long coat that dragged on the ground, spotted with moth-eaten holes, and a scarf that wound across its neck like a noose and draped on the floorboards. Besides stiff slacks and high heeled boots, little else of its outfit could be understood. “You and us are the same. We’ve both been betrayed by powerful people.” It used two of its claws to pry one of its eyes open, giggling. “I Spy, with my many eyes, a lonely person betrayed. A person who trusted, and a person who was _twisted_ by powerful people.” It tilted its head left, then right. “I am rarely sympathetic, Miss Archivist. I just want to help you.”

“Help me with _what_?” Sasha hissed. 

“Help you not turn into me,” Michael said serenely. “A self is an awful thing to be.”

“I am nothing like you!” Sasha yelled, louder than she intended, and she instinctively flinched. She couldn’t afford for Tim or Martin or - god, or Jon - to hear her losing her cool and come running. Quietly, she hissed again, “I am not _like_ you and we are not _friends_.”

“You will need all the friends you can get, Archivist.” Michael stepped closer, and Sasha refused to move from her seat, furiously scowling up at it. “Can you really afford to turn my help down?”

Sasha breathed in deeply, and hissed an exhale. She met Michael’s eyes, those awful spiraling pits of confusion, and refused to look away. “Whatever is coming for me,” she said clearly, “I can handle it. I...know you think you’re trying to help, but I can handle whatever is coming by myself. I don’t need anyone’s help. Much less yours.”

For a long, aching moment, Michael just stared at her. It tilted its head, trying to parse her apart, and Sasha refused to blink. She couldn’t show weakness. Not now.

“I will help you,” Michael said, “because we have the same enemy. I desire your survival in what will come. And because you remind me of myself, and nobody ever helped me. Put your hand on the desk and stand very still. You don’t want me to miss! Or maybe you do.”

For a reason not even she understood, out of some immortal and desperate and pathetic impulse, Sasha slowly put her right hand palm down on her desk. 

Michael looked down at it, like a fisherman searching for the shadows of fish in the stream, before lifting a finger and neatly stabbing her through the hand. 

The pain was instant and excruciating. It felt like she had been pinched with red hot pokers, as if she had been torn through - which, of course, she had. Sasha howled, more of a scream than a cry, and she felt her mind curl up in agony. Everything whited out, her world reducing to nothing more than pain and betrayal. 

She heard her own yelling, echoed distantly in a strange tenor. She screamed in agony for a long eternity, before it redoubled in a sick sensation and then reduced to a hot throb. 

“That’ll come in handy,” Michael said, “one day. Heh. Handy. Get it, Archivist?”

When Sasha looked up, tears in her eyes, Michael was gone. Only its door was left, and in a minute the door split into nothingness too. Her plain, boring, cheap brown door resumed its ordinary place, and in less than a second the door burst open to find Tim and Martin spilling into her room. 

Distantly, Sasha was aware of blood pooling in a ruby puddle under her impaled hand. She was beginning to feel faint. She probably wouldn’t _have_ to go to the hospital, she dimly recognized, but seeing as Michael’s finger had gone all the way through then she probably should anyway. This would be an excellent opportunity to test if she could still die. 

Both Tim and Martin screamed. 

“Oh, don’t be such babies,” Sasha said, before she abruptly decided it would be a good idea to rest her head on her desk and relax a little bit. “I don’t need a hospital.”

“Like _fuck_ !” Tim yelled. “What the _fuck_ , James!”

Maybe Michael was right, after all. 

The world twisted and turned, shifting and long and short and incomprehensible. Sasha felt someone picking her up, felt herself pulled through time and space and packed into a car. The world faded in and out, always aware but never quite sensate, and Sasha let herself drift pleasantly. Voices echoed, almost shouted, in her ear, but she ignored most of them. Part of her just wished that the pain was enough to make her black out or faint, but instead it narrowed her world into pain and only pain. Maybe it was shock. 

Had she gotten _stabbed_?

Yes, Sasha realized as a nurse gave her pain killers and washed the wound, a doctor poked around it and said words which may have been surprise over the unnatural size and force of the wound, she had been stabbed. By...someone who had never _explicitly_ wanted to hurt her. Distantly she was aware of someone asking her what had stabbed her. 

“Mugging,” a familiar voice said confidently next to her. “We were going to lunch and some tweaker just, like, came _at_ us. Seriously fucked up. No, a police report probably isn’t necessary. Don’t remember what the guy looked like at all. I was so focused on getting my wallet out, you know? What kind of asshole stabs an innocent woman just because she won’t give him enough money?”

“ - weapon -”

“Skewer. Weird, right? Hey, by the way, these medical files are outdated, my _girlfriend_ ’s name is -”

Then they sewed her skin shut, bandaged her wound, gave what could only be Tim a lot of flyers and leaflets and explained how to take care of the wound, and before Sasha knew it both she and Tim were sitting in his poky car staring vaguely out the window. They sat in silence. Instead of pain, Sasha instead felt fuzzy and distant from her body. It was really fucking dope. What the fuck were in these painkillers?

“I can’t quit,” Tim said finally. Sasha turned her head to look at him in surprise. For the first time, she really focused on him: the bags under his eyes, how his fake smile had slid from his face, his limp and stringy hair. “I tried. When I told you I had left on that vacation, I - I hadn’t wanted to come back. I was going to write a letter, bring you with me after a bit. But...I couldn’t. I thought maybe it might be you, that I was so guilty over leaving I had to return, but…”

“I know,” Sasha said, surprising herself. “We can’t. Not anymore.”

He wasn’t looking at her, chin propped on his hand and his elbow resting against the window. He was staring up at the clouds, at the clear blue sky and the winter birds that enjoyed their freedom in the air. 

“I heard everything,” Tim whispered. “I wanted to come in the minute I heard that bastard’s grating voice, but the door had disappeared. I was thumping on the wall, but I don’t think you could hear me. Useless. Again. Always, I guess.”

Sasha sighed. She wanted to go to bed. Sleep sounded good. “Give up on protecting me, Tim.”

“What?” Tim turned to look at her, and for the first time she saw that his eyes were red-rimmed. “How can you say that?”

“You can’t do it,” Sasha said flatly. “So give up on it. We’ll all try to keep ourselves and each other alive. Worst comes to worst, I’m pretty sure Jon’s invested too much in me to let me die now. You aren’t a failure for just being human, Tim.”

He stared at her, for several long moments, before he turned the key in the engine and drove her home. They spent the ride in silence, and Sasha was glad. 

She collapsed in bed, only sliding off her high heels before collapsing in bed, and instantly dropped into the relief of sleep. 

Sasha dreamed that she sat in an ice cream shop with all of her coworkers, and that Tim was going to propose to her and he was just waiting for the right moment, but he couldn’t work up the courage because Danny kept on telling him that she was going to cheat on him. Sasha wanted to explain to Danny that her medical records had lied but she couldn’t find him. Instead she just ate ice cream with Martin, who wouldn’t stop making out with Jon, and Tim, who had waited so long that he kept on losing his diamond ring even though Sasha didn’t like jewelry, and Jon who only stopped making out with Martin to tell Sasha that he was her new dad, and the mean cop whose name Sasha couldn’t remember was a wolf who kept on trying to tell Tim that his diamond ring had been stolen by clowns but he wasn’t listening, he couldn’t listen, he just kept on looking and looking no matter how many times Sasha begged him to just sit down and enjoy his ice cream. 

“What am I doing here,” Helen Richardson sobbed, who couldn’t eat any ice cream because she was lactose intolerant. “I want to get out of here! I want to go home!”

But there was no home, Sasha couldn’t explain to Helen Richardson, not ever again, because Jon and Martin had moved into her house as newlyweds tended to do and she could never go home again. 

That, at least, Sasha had always known: that there was no going home again. 

  
  


Maybe it was the devil.

The mysterious ‘god’ that Jon had soul his sold to. The great twisting, the great lie and deceit, that Michael both served and was a part of. Maybe it was something as simple as the Serpent, the Adversary, who whispered sweet lies and tricks into the ears of god-fearing people and tempted them into evil.

Something was tempting Sasha. She knew it. Strange things had become appealing, and her emotions were being twisted into something foreign. Sasha had always needed to _know_ , to understand, to consume information like a dragon sitting on its horde. But something about her lately had changed. She was self-aware enough to know. She suspected that people like Tim, if this had been happening to them, wouldn’t have realized, but Sasha knew her own mind fiercely and completely. She did not doubt herself or her experiences, and she would never let another person dictate her mind for her again. 

She was changing. It wasn’t in any way that felt unnatural, really. The last year had been somewhat traumatic, and if she hadn’t already known that _something_ weird was going on she would have written it off as trauma. 

But she was sliding into something. She wanted to know _what_. 

She was afraid that it was Jon.

Tim didn’t understand. How could he? He was unravelling. Tim had always been wire coiled tightly together, held together by sheer tension and gravity, but he was shaking loose. 

Martin might have thought he understood, but Sasha wondered if Martin had always been crazy. He didn’t seem aware that he was acting in ways no normal human would, reacting with intrigue and curiosity to a monster far beyond his imagining. If he was playing Jon, or if Jon was playing him, or if Elias was playing everyone like a symphonic orchestra...she didn’t know. 

Even the strange women lingering at the corners of their lives had grown strange and twisted, seemingly just by sheer association. Melanie King, that Youtuber Sasha was secretly a fan of, seemed more and more frantic and desperate every time she stepped foot inside the Institute to conduct her strange research. Basira Hussain, the cop who was apparently just a platonic friend, was throwing herself deeper and deeper into investigations of dangerous cults and high profile murderers seemingly without care or concern. And Daisy Tonner...Sasha suspected that she had been twisted far before she stepped foot into the institute. Whatever rot had taken place in her, it has been festering for a very long time.

She only had the courage to ask Jon about it once, when she caught him and Martin eating lunch together at the cafeteria yet again. Tim, standing beside her and chatting up the unamused cashier, obviously wanted to do their usual and eat in the Archives, but she found herself grabbing her tray and striding confidently to Martin and Jon’s table, dropping her tray with a clatter next to Martin and making him jump a foot in the air. Maybe a louder clatter than she intended - her right hand was still basically useless, and would be for a few more weeks. 

“Sasha!” Martin squeaked, quickly straightening from where he had been leaning into some fascinating story or whatever Jon had been telling. “Why are -”

“Do you worship the devil?” Sasha asked flatly, sitting down primly in her chair and scooching it into the table. “You can be honest.”

Jon blinked owlishly at her as Tim, scowling, thumped his tray down next to Sasha and sat down with them. Nice to know that his pure hatred of Jon didn’t outweigh how much he hated leaving Sasha alone with him. True solidarity. 

“You always ask the most fascinating questions,” Jon said, almost _excitedly_ , and suddenly Martin was glaring at Sasha almost as hard as Tim was glaring at Jon. The dynamics of their office were _so stupid_. “I suppose in a way, if you take the perspective of the Devil as a role rather than an entity. As Christians colonized and converted other religions, they tended to cast one of the many gods in the pantheons as the ‘Devil’ figure. Loki and Hades serving as premier examples. It is a common tactic of colonizers, as Romans did something similar with the Greeks and the other religions within their empire. I suppose that Christians would, when faced with fitting my religion into their worldview, view my god as an agent of -”

“I don’t know,” Martin said, chewing a corned beef sandwich clearly brought from home, “I think God plays on fear as much as your guy does.”

“That’s _also_ fascinating, Martin,” Jon said, making Martin flush. “When you think about it, there are many similarities between God and, as you say, ‘my guy’. The Christian God emphasizes His complete knowledge and understanding of your innermost thoughts and intentions, seeing all and knowing all in His omniscience and omnipotence. God as being ‘all seeing’ is pervasive throughout Western Culture, as well as the concept of ‘thoughtcrimes’ as relates to sin, and it’s fairly useful in encouraging surveillance states. In my work with the Red Scare, Joe and I would -”

“I’m sorry,” Tim interrupted, not sounding very sorry at all, “I don’t give a shit about God or Western culture or whatever. What do thoughtcrimes have to do with it?”

“Oh, you know,” Jon said, waving a hand. “ ‘But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’. That sort of thing. It’s easy. Tell people that some force - God, the government, their mothers - know every thought in their mind. Tell people that the _wrong_ thoughts result in punishment. Punish at random and let them draw their own conclusions about what caused it. They go insane within weeks. If you raise a child within those beliefs, then they’ll grow up into adults who never even consider questioning authority. From there, facism is quite easy to -”

“Matthew 5:28 isn’t meant to promote facism, Jon,” Martin said, almost reprimanding. “If you actually understand the spirit of Jesus’ teachings, he was explicitly anti-facist.”

“Yes, of course it’s against the spirit of the thing, but religion is an unbelievably useful tool for this sort of thing. Buddhism is also easy to use, although of course it’s against the spirit of that too.” Jon grinned slightly at Martin. “Few people these days know their Bible, Martin, I’m impressed.”

In one of the stupidest things that Sasha had seen that day, Martin blushed slightly. “Ah, you know, Sunday School growing up and all that. Mum was one of those types and all. I’m not as - ah, you know - as I used to be, but I like the peace and love message. It’s nice.”

“Oh, would you like to go to church with me some time? I’m blackmailing a few ministers, trying to see if I can drive them into insanity and all that. I kept an Eye on a collaborative effort between a few of my colleagues and Father Edwin Burroughs, and it turned out so wonderfully that I’m trying to see if I can push sinful priests out of the church through gaslighting them.”

“Well, I’d love to be part of an altruistic effort to drive predators out of authority positions!”

Jon beamed. “Wonderful! I suppose it is rather altruistic, isn’t it? That’s good!”

“Yes, Jon, that is good!”

“Can I help?” Sasha asked, fascinated. “I have a list of dickheads in my community I’d like to see disgraced.”

“Of course, Ms. James. This would be a wonderful learning opportunity for you to use your own burgeoning -”

“No. No, no, no.” Tim reached out a hand and sliced through the air, gently pushing Sasha back. “We are not blackmailing anyone. What the fuck is wrong with you people.”

“I like blackmail,” Jon said, somewhat offended. At Martin’s hilariously prissy look, Jon quickly followed up with, “I like blackmailing _bad_ people. Who _deserve_ it.”

“Very good,” Martin said, passing Jon a handful of Tooty Frooties, which Jon quickly and eagerly consumed. 

It was stupid of her to forget that Jon, in his previous life, had been a sociologist and anthropologist before the fields truly existed. As little as Jon understood humanity, he had dedicated the greater part of his more than two hundred years to studying them. He understood, maybe better than anyone else alive, how to manipulate, bend, influence, and break them. 

Which, of course, raised the question: how had _Martin_ managed, through judicious application of children’s candy and disapproving looks, to manipulate Jon?

“Oh, it’s easy,” Martin said, “you just have to have something that the other person wants.”

Sasha, who had cornered Martin at his desk at the end of the day, narrowed her eyes. Martin didn’t look up, neatly stapling and filing and organizing Statements. Tim had already left, citing a meeting with an informant at a coffee shop. It worried Sasha slightly - he very rarely left the office before her, staying later and later and usually only leaving if Sasha pushed him. She wondered if he was telling the truth. She was afraid that he wasn’t. It...rankled.

“How do you...figure something like that out?”

Martin just shrugged. Sort, staple, file. The soothing office sounds, the background to her life, took on a different echo in Martin’s hands. “I just can just tell? It’s, like, an instinct, I guess. It was pretty useful for managing my Mum, ha ha.” His chuckle was a laugh in the same way that Michael was a person. “I guess if I had to put it into words, I’d say that Jon’s, uh, insecure.”

“...I don’t believe you,” Sasha said flatly. She had heard Jon uncaringly confess to murder, torture, infiltration and influence of foreign governments, blackmail, _and_ being rich. He was pretentious, arrogant, and practically sociopathic. There was nothing about him that ever screamed _insecurity_.

But Martin just shrugged. “Okay. Sure. But, you know, the first thing I thought when I saw Jon...well, the second thing, the first thing I thought was that he looked just like Jonathan Sims the First...was, like, ‘ _here_ ’s a guy who knows he doesn’t belong’.” He stapled a statement together again, looking vaguely uncomfortable. “See it in the mirror every day. And I got to wondering...you know, he owns the place. Literally. Why would he feel like he doesn’t belong?”

“Did you ever find out?”

“Yep.” Sort, staple, file. Thunk, thunk, thunk went the stapler. “Then once you figure out what someone wants, then you figure out how to promise it to them. You never give it, duh, but...then they’re on the hook for as long as you want. It’s easy.” Martin shrugged uncomfortably. “The thing about Jon, I think, that only two people know - three, if you count me, I guess - is that he’s a good person. He wants to be responsible with power. He wants to do the right thing. He wants to help other people and be kind.”

“Really,” Sasha said flatly, her disbelief leaching through her words.

“Or at least he did. Once. I think he forgot that he ever wanted that. Maybe - a hundred years ago? A hundred and fifty years ago?” Martin neatly stacked the Statements, piling them in a cardboard box. “All I’ve had to do is remind him, really. That he wanted something more, once, and that he can still want something more. People like Jon always want something more than what they have. He’s a climber. Sorry, is that all? It’s time for me to clock out.”

It was all, but not enough.

After Martin cleaned his mugs and turned out the lights, wishing her a soft good night, Sasha sat at her desk, curled over her phone. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, activating programs and subroutines and plugging in information into the app that she built a few weeks ago. 

It was the kind of thing that she hadn’t been capable of last year, but ever since she had intensified her study of computer science she had been making leaps and bounds. Her code was fantastic, and she was proud of it. She had been emailing and messaging that woman who had come in a while back, Tessa Winters, and they had been collaborating on something really special. 

Her app finally finished loading, pulling up location and GPS data on her phone. Sasha couldn’t help but crack a smile. She quickly plugged the GPS data into her knock-off Google Maps, waiting impatiently for the address to load. 

According to her homebrew app, the phone that she was currently ripping GPS data from was in...a parking lot behind a sporting goods store. 

Hm. _Not_ a coffee shop, as promised. Sasha remotely accessed the microphone, flipping it on and letting tinny sound echo from her phone’s speakers. 

It was grainy, and almost indistinguishable, but if Sasha focused she could make the contents out. 

“...two hundred quid.”

“Here you go.”

“Thanks. Have a good night.”

“You too, mate.”

Sasha sighed. Idiot. 

Too expensive for an illegal knife. Likely a gun, or something similar. What was that idiot _doing_? 

They had found Gertrude’s laptop, and Sasha had cracked it open easily. Nothing exciting was inside at all except a bookmarked Ravelry page and a Facebook account which only seemed to follow deceased faces, which Sasha had quietly found extremely suspicious but that Tim had blown off. What did he think he was doing? What would buying a pistol in a parking lot _help_? 

It would make him feel better, and maybe that’s all he was thinking about right now. 

She sighed, kneading her forehead. Think about what Martin said. She could keep him safe if she could just control his behavior. What did Tim want?

Her safe. Her human. Both of them out of the Institute. For _him_ to feel safe again, because surrounded by monsters and enemies he probably never felt safe either. He had been reading every statement on the circus and clowns he could find, as well as those awful delivery men. 

The silver makeup compact in her purse flashed through her mind, the one with the beautiful etched design, but she promptly dismissed it. Focus, James!

How could Sasha make Tim feel safe? 

Information always made Sasha feel safer. She could tell him who she suspected Gertrude’s murderer was...but she had no real proof, and she knew that it would spurn Tim into doing something rash. Disregard that, then.

How about shifting his focus. The clowns weren’t around to fire them or anything, that was probably safe. Hadn’t Melanie King been doing a lot of research on the sawdust stuffed skin of Sarah Baldwin? That was clowny. 

Maybe she could connect them. She enjoyed talking to Melanie. They chatted about their favorite microphones fairly frequently, and Sasha helped her cheat on CodeAcademy and Duolingo. Sasha taught her curse words in Spanish and Melanie taught her curse words in Irish. Equality. 

Sasha flipped apps on her phone.

 **Sasha** : Hey Melanie! So my buff and angry boyfriend just scored a piece in the back of a parking lot and I think he needs more constructive uses of his energy, can you take him out with you next time you do footwork so he can blow off some steam?? Thanks!!!

 **Melanie:** are u tryin to look me up with your boyfriend?

 **Melanie:** no judgement i just want to know. also im lesbo.

 **Sasha:** We’re open but no, I genuinely just need someone to take him for walkies. 

**Melanie:** aaaaa

 **Melanie:** uhh yeah sure can he pick a lock

 **Sasha:** He works at the Magnus Institute! Of course he does. 

**Melanie:** terrifying jlkasjdlf thanks

This may have been a bad idea, but Melanie had that chaotic energy without being full on batshit crazy. Not that Sasha knew her too well, but…

It would be fine. Things would be fine. 

She had to believe that. 

  
  
  


Christmas came and went. Sasha had spent it alone for the last ten years, and she had been ready to spend the night with a bottle of wine and Rankin-Bass yet again, but Tim had taken it for granted that they would be spending it together. It was never even a question to him. 

She gave him a chain necklace with three birthdates engraved into the links - his, hers, and Danny’s. He had cried. He gave her one of her dream wishlist fountain pens that she had been salivating over for years, making her cry despite the fact that she knew he really didn’t get her whole fountain pen thing. 

Reluctantly, she even texted Martin a merry christmas message. He sent back a smiley face, and a selfie of him at a Chinese restaurant. In the background, Jon could be seen, unaware he was being photographed. He was looking at Martin with something strange in his eyes, foreign and soft, a half-smile tugging at his lips. 

Sasha wanted to delete the selfie, but she saved it to her phone instead. She didn’t know what that meant. When she got a package on her doorstep, unaddressed and wrapped in thick brown paper - a rare first edition book that she had been hunting for - she didn’t know what that meant either. 

Or maybe she only wished that she didn’t. 

Tim began disappearing, citing hang-outs with Melanie. Sasha was fairly certain that these hang-outs with Melanie were actually, legitimately hang-outs with Melanie, but he tended to come back at odd hours, smelling of smoke, sometimes limping.

Sometimes, when he thought she wasn’t looking, he looked at her as if she was a stranger. The tentative and frightened conversation they had begun having about living together petered out, and Sasha didn’t know why.

On New Year’s Eve they had a party at the Archives after-hours. Lots of alcohol was smuggled in, waiting and giggling until they were certain that everybody in the building had left for the day, and she and Tim and Martin cracked open bottles of champagne and did dramatic re-enactments of the statements that they were certain were fake. 

Even Jon stopped by and joined, although he was allergic to fun. He didn’t stay too long, likely well aware that if Tim was subjected to his presence for longer than ten minutes things tended to get broken, but he had brought enough good champagne that Tim magnanimously accepted his presence. Helped that he was already drunk. Tim had been drunk a lot lately.

But Martin was happy to see him, smiling sadly and holding out a cracker, and Jon easily grabbed onto the other end. In silent consensus, he and Martin pulled exactly as one, and the cracker popped open easily with a loud crack and the faint smell of gunpowder. 

“Cheap,” Jon sniffed, as Martin happily poked through the bounty. “They used to be much nicer. Jewelry, fans, and such like. Now it’s all plastic.”

“Fond memories of snapping these bad boys open when you were in short pants, boss?” Tim drawled, chugging his champagne. He was sitting on his desk, arm around Sasha’s shoulders as she sat next to him. “Lightning the Christmas tree candles?”

“No. They weren’t popularized until...ah, fifties? Perhaps?” Jon shrugged, dipping his head down to allow Martin to carefully place the paper hat on his head. He looked very silly, yet somehow regal. “Christmas trees were one of those fads for flighty women and easily entertained children. My childhood Christmas traditions consisted of...helping decorate and prepare for twelve days of useless balls.”

“Useless?” Martin asked, crushed. “You got to go to a real life Mansfield Park Christmas ball and you call it useless?”

“Martin, I don’t know how to explain to you that frivolous parties are a lot less fun when you’re pouring the wine.”

“You have no appreciation of the romantic,” Martin sniffed, but judging from the half-smiles that he and Jon flashed at each other it was possible that they were teasing each other. It was hard to tell, with them. Martin unfolded a little paper envelope from the cracker - the label marked it as a Fortuneteller Fish, that could read your personality and future based on how it curled up in your hand - and carefully deposited it in Jon’s open palm.

It curled at the ends, the head and tail curving inwards to form a slight ‘U’ shape. Martin looked disappointed. “Fickle.”

“So it seems.”

The two men looked at each other, then quickly looked away. Tim chugged his champagne faster. 

When midnight hit, they all drunkenly cheered, and Tim swooped in for a kiss. Sasha kissed him back enthusiastically, also somewhat drunk, and they were so wrapped up in each other that if anything else had been happening she would have missed it.

When she and Tim finally separated Jon and Martin were very steadfastly not looking at each other, both looking very uncomfortable, and she wondered if something _did_ happen - but if something did, it would really be none of her business. 

“Happy New Year,” Sasha announced, world titling and lilting oddly as she held up her glass. “And to many more! May 2017 be better than 2016!”

“Hear hear!” Tim called, clinking his glass with hers. “Nothing could be fucking worse!”

“Hear hear,” Martin said, cautiously clicking his glass - sparkling apple juice - with her own and sipping it. “I feel like things are only going to get better. Really.”

Jon didn’t toast, just sipping from his glass, and soon enough Tim turned on him. “Guess you’ve been to enough of these that they aren’t that exciting, huh, boss? Only so many celebrations you can have before they’re stale?”

“I, uh, suppose.” Jon clenched his drink, somewhat awkwardly. “Georgie usually drags me to her parties, if that is what you’re asking. This is the first time in a while I’ve spent it with…”

He trailed off awkwardly, and Tim sneered. “With who? Your boyfriend, the woman you’re doing Frankenstein experiments on, and a guy who _hates_ you?”

“That’s out of line,” Martin said sharply. 

“Is _anything_ I can say to this guy worse than what he’s already done to us?” Tim demanded. 

“Jon didn’t _make_ us get attacked by worms -”

“I’ll be real fucking surprised if he didn’t!”

All of a sudden, abruptly, it was just too much. Sasha slid off her seat on the desk, world spinning and jerking abruptly, and found herself trying to navigate towards the door. “I gotta go to the loo,” Sasha announced. “Sims, c’mere and make sure I don’t get...lost.”

“Of course,” Jon said, gentleman as ever, and turned a deaf ear to Tim’s complaints as he opened the door out of the Archives for Sasha and followed her down the hall.

The bathroom was halfway between Artifact Storage and the Archives, a small gender-neutral bathroom a short distance from the Archives in the middle of the hallway. Even that small distance was insurmountable to Sasha, who found herself almost walking into a wall three different times, only saved from a concussion by Jon carefully catching her and orienting her away from the wall. It wasn’t like her to overdrink - or, at least, it hadn’t used to be like her. This wasn’t the only way she had changed. 

“It’s okay,” Sasha said, patting Jon on the arm as he saved her from the wall again. He was dressed in his greatcoat again, having never taken it off, covering his prim suit. “I know you didn’t send worms and shit to eat me.”

Jon...looked away. Guiltily. 

Even drunk, Sasha narrowed her eyes. She stopped walking, leaning against the wall and fixing Jon with her best glare. “Ya didn’t.”

“I didn’t,” Jon said quickly. “Truly. I simply...feel as if I could have done more. To keep you safe. The Director told me that we needed to let you fly on your own, see how you react under adversity, and he was _right_ , I just...didn’t like you or Martin in danger.”

But he had. Jon was the only reason they had gotten fire extinguishers in the first place, or had gotten the fire suppression systems outfitted with CO2. He had paid for it out of his own pocket when Elias refused to do it. 

“You saved me,” Sasha said bluntly. “When I ran into the Artifact Storage...you got me out of there.”

“Ah. Yes.” Jon stared at her, eyes wide, looking almost guilty, as if she was accusing him of something. “There’s a certain fragment of the Stranger in there, and it really was _just_ about to eat you, and I figured it would be a waste of time if -”

He was interrupted by Sasha’s hug. Really, it was more of a topple - she reached up, looping her arms around his neck, and fitted herself perfectly into the gap that the greatcoat left behind. Jon froze still, stiff as a board, uncertain what to do with the movement. Sasha had half-expected his body to be cold, to be stiff and unyielding like a corpse, but instead she found him just as warm as a human being. 

There was no rush of blood under her hands where they linked behind his neck. There was no gentle rise and fall of his chest. But, after a few seconds, she felt Jon’s chest gently rise and fall. A perfect imitation, a mimicry of the breath of life. 

Jon was pretending to breathe for her. 

She buried her head into his neck, pulling him closer, and with excruciating gentle slowness Jon’s hands rose and gently pressed against her back. It was indescribably awkward and strange, something just to the left of center of what a normal human hug was supposed to look like, but maybe he hadn’t had one of those in a while. 

“Thank you.”

“I - you’re welcome,” Jon said, sounding slightly dumbfounded, as if nobody had thanked him for anything in quite a long time. 

“I don’t wanna be like you,” Sasha slurred. 

“No,” Jon whispered, “you’ll be much better, I think.”

“Jon, I’m scared.”

It was, maybe, the kind of thing that she would have only admitted drunk. Sasha had stopped voicing feelings like that out loud - weakness. She couldn’t be weak anymore. Nobody would protect her, or keep her safe. The world was dangerous and uncertain. She could only rely on herself from now on. 

So why did she always -

“Sasha!”

If Jon was planning on saying anything to that, if there was anything to say, he didn’t get the opportunity. Tim’s voice echoed down the hall, and Jon quickly extricated himself from Sasha’s grip. Sasha stumbled, still dizzy, looking up to see the fuzzy form of Tim standing down the hallway. 

“Tim!” Jon said, panicked. 

“Tim!” Sasha cried, happy. “G’rp hug!”

“Get away from her, you creep!”

Sasha didn’t remember much after that - the night melting into Tim helping her to the bathroom, and him quickly and correctly deciding that she was too drunk to continue at the party. She remembered being helped to a cot, the same cot that Martin had spent many restless nights on, gentle hands helping get her shoes off, and a calloused hand sweeping her hair away from her face before the lights were turned off in the small room.

Maybe the rest of it was a dream, then. 

Maybe Sasha dreamed that she woke up in the middle of the night, nauseous and tired, only to find a figure standing above her bed. It was lanky, tall and awkward and overly skinny, and its green eyes shined like poison. 

It didn’t seem to notice that she was awake. Maybe it wasn’t really looking at her at all. Maybe it was just consumed by the past, eyes looking but never truly seeing, always wrapped up in moments a long time passed. 

“Jonah,” the dream whispered. “Are we doing the right thing? I always thought we were. But the world is so much more complicated than it was when we were children, Jonah. Have I become the cold eyes I always hated? Was there ever any other choice?”

He paused, as if something truly was responding to him. 

“I’m hurting her. She’s like I was, and I’m hurting her. Is that an evil thing?”

She fell back asleep, and the dream slipped through her fingers. Sasha found herself wondering, as she tripped backwards into sleep, if Jon had ever been scared of what he was turning into, but the thought was so strange and ridiculous that she couldn’t keep it in mind, and she soon sunk into unconsciousness. 

  
  
  
  


Melanie and Tim begun to hang out more. 

Which wasn’t a bad thing. It was, in fact, pretty much what Sasha had wanted. The only issue was that Tim seemed to be getting worse. 

He tried to hide it from her, but Sasha didn’t miss much. She saw him patching his own wounds, dark cuts that bled a sluggish red, without telling her. They fought more often, about both stupid and serious stuff. Sometimes, when he looked at her, he looked straight through her. As if he was seeing a stranger. 

She tried to pry him to see what he and Melanie were investigating, but he was remarkably close-lipped. So, as usual, Sasha found alternate methods.

According to his account with the Magnus Institute library, he and Melanie had been checking out a lot of books about circuses. To be expected, although Sasha wasn’t totally happy about it. But it went deeper: they were also checking out books about doppelgangers, replacements, and changelings. 

The statement about the boy Graham from across the street went missing, and reappeared soon afterwards. Other statements - the homophobic vase, sawdust and calliopes - too. The Statements from Gertrude Tim had found and had kept in his flat also went missing, and when she asked about it Tim had pretended that he had turned them over to Basira for the police investigation. 

Liar. He was lying to her. What was he doing that had to be under her nose? Why couldn’t they be a team on this?

As weird as it was, Jon and Martin were a team. Sasha had seen it for herself: Jon was always asking Martin for his thoughts on a decision before he made it. It was as if he didn’t trust his own decisions: always letting Elias dictate what he did, and when he went against Elias he usually went to Martin about it first. Not that it was exactly a bad thing - Martin wasn’t a moral paragon but Sasha basically trusted him not to be evil, or at the very least not to use his evil powers for evil - but it was strange. And somewhat isolating. The evil immortal psychic vampire trusted the high school drop-out in his decisions. Why couldn’t Tim trust Sasha?

She confronted him about it only once, when she found yet another Statement missing. She ended up having to call Tim into her office about it, stressing out far too much about the confrontation, and eventually settling on just being blunt. 

“Why are Statements going missing?” Sasha asked him, when Tim shut the door behind him. 

“If I knew, then they’d hardly be missing, would they?” Tim joked faintly. At Sasha’s flat expression, he sobered too. “I don’t know.”

“You’re lying.”

“How do you know that?” Tim asked, somewhat sarcastically. He already knew, he just wanted to hear her say it. 

“I just...do.” Sasha shifted uncomfortably. “I just do.”

“That’s not worrying at all.”

“I can hardly control it, Tim!”

“Can’t you?” Tim asked sharply. “Maybe something’s triggering it. Maybe if you read less Statements, or spent less time cozying up with monster freaks -”

“I haven’t talked to Michael since he stabbed me,” Sasha said, heart beating a steady rhythm in her chest. She didn’t feel stressed out, or upset, or angry. She didn’t feel much of all. “And I can hardly help seeing Jon around the place. What would you have me do?”

“You aren’t even trying,” Tim said coldly. “You don’t even care about your humanity anymore. If you ever even had it.”

Before Sasha could say anything to that, if there was anything to say, he turned on his heel and stomped out the door, slamming it behind him. 

His words were hurtful, but Sasha pushed the hurt aside. What had he meant? What was he suspecting her of? What was wrong with her?

When she left her office for lunch, pulling on her coat, the bullpen was empty except for Martin, serenely typing away on transcribing a bogus statement. 

“Where’s Tim?”

“Dunno,” Martin said, not looking up from his computer. “Constable Hussain came in and he took her statement, then he left right afterwards.”

“What?” Sasha sighed. “I’m supposed to take the direct statements. Why didn’t you both at least tell me?”

Martin shrugged, fingers rapping away on the keyboard. “Tim seemed pretty empathetic that he was the one to handle this. He and Basira are friends, anyway.” He reached out and tapped a cassette lying innocently next to him on the desk. “Recorded live. I’d take a listen, if I was you.”

So that was how Sasha spent her lunch break: chewing a cold sandwich, listening to Basira dispassionately recite a near-death experience. Tim didn’t talk much: just once at the beginning, and once more at the end.

“Alright,” Tim said, the second the tape clicked on. “You ready?”

“Whatever,” Basira said. “Sure you don’t want me to tell this to your girlfriend?”

“If my hunch is right, you’ll be much better off if you don’t,” Tim said grimly. Before Sasha could wonder what _that_ meant, Basira had launched into her statement, and Sasha was swept away.

“What are you going to do now?” Basira asked. Why? Had she seen something in his face? In his expression? What scared her?

“I’m gonna do the best I can,” Tim joked, an old reference with a hard edge, and the cassette clicked off.

When lunch break was over, Tim still wasn’t back. But that wasn’t so unusual. He often took long lunches. He just normally took them with her.

An hour later, he still wasn’t back. 

**Sasha:** hey when you coming back 2 the office

He didn’t respond. 

At three pm, Tim had been gone for two hours, and missing for one. Maybe he went home early for the day. He did that pretty often. He just normally _told_ her. 

**Sasha:** hey u at home?

Sasha remotely logged into the webcam doorbell she had installed in both her and Tim’s places a month back. She scrolled through the footage. No sign of Tim, at either of their flats. 

Heart thumping in her chest, Sasha traced his phone. It was...here. At the institute. Hadn’t moved at all, supposedly. 

Sasha slammed the door to her office open, striding towards Tim’s desk and quickly rooting through it in a search for his phone. He hadn’t left it here. She looked through the entire office, calling him on her own mobile, receiving no response. Martin glanced at her out of the corner of his eye like she was a crazy person. 

She would give it another hour. One more hour. Maybe he was - maybe he was -

Fifteen minutes later of Sasha pacing her office, she threw on her coat and stomped into the main bullpen. 

“Tim’s missing.”

“I was thinking that,” Martin lightly agreed, shutting his computer off with no hesitation and slinging on his own coat, as if he had just been waiting for her to say something. “What do we do?”

“Time to see if Sims is good for anything.”

She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t. If Sasha told herself that enough times, then maybe it could be true. If she wanted it badly enough. 

They, of course, found Jon easily enough in the Institute library. Although he wasn’t always at the Institute, frequently mysteriously fucking off to parts unknown and terrorizing mystery people, when he was he could usually be found either in the library, Elias’ office, or the Archives. He always had a talent for being around when she most and least needed him. Just like he had a talent for ruining her life and saving it. What an asshole. 

Today, he was sitting on the floor of the stacks, mechanically and rapidly combing through books. He sat next to a teetering pile and pulled one down from the top, leafing through it in a pattern that made sense only to him, before shaking his head and putting it on another pile on his other side and pulling down another book. Completely absorbed in “History of Voodoo in New Orleans”, he didn’t notice Sasha and Martin approaching until they were practically standing in front of him. 

Jon looked up from his book when her shadow fell over it, smiling a little when he saw Martin. Martin, embarrassingly, smiled back and gave him a little wave. “What’s the emergency?”

“What makes you think there’s an emergency?”

“You’re speaking to me voluntarily during work hours,” Jon said, in a tone of voice he probably thought was reasonable. He snapped his book shut and replaced it on the stack, unfolding his gangly limbs and standing up until he was towering over Martin again. “I’ll see if I can help.”

For some reason, the sentence shocked her - that he had agreed, just like that. That he would help her, just like that. Somehow, Sasha had the feeling that the Jon as he had been when they had first met wouldn’t have been so quick to agree. How deeply could a two hundred year old man change in a year? Was it even possible? 

Martin smiled, small but genuine, and Jon smiled crookedly back. 

“It’s Tim,” Sasha said, throat abruptly dry. “He’s disappeared. I don’t know where he is. If you know anything -”

“Jon always knows where everyone is,” Martin said authoritatively, “he can find him just fine. Right?”

“Ah. Right!” Jon blinked, looking somewhat off-balance. “Er - remind me, Tim’s the -”

“My angry boyfriend.”

“Right, right, the East Asian chap, yes.” Jon scratched his chin as Martin, who was equally East Asian, looked severely not pleased. “That’s a simple matter. Although I hope I’m not getting in the middle of a domestic, I always feel so uncomfortable with those. I’ve had my own fair share with Georgie, thank you very much. Tim, Tim, Tim Ji-hoon Stoker...hm.” In the bright fluorescent library light, it was difficult to tell, but Jon’s eyes pulsed a soft and steady green. “That’s strange.”

Fear gripped Sasha’s heart and squeezed. “What’s strange?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Jon said, looking almost offended at the prospect. “I don’t Know anything about it. It’s not confused and twisted, like the Stranger or the Spiral...it’s just on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite recall.”

“Oh, Jesus shit,” Martin whispered. “The tunnels. That idiot.”

“The tunnels?” Sasha whirled around on Martin, heart beating triple time in her chest. “What do you mean, the tunnels?”

Sasha knew about the tunnels. She was, uncomfortably, more than aware of them. She had never gone in them herself, because she didn’t have a _fucking death wish_ and her idea of a good time wasn’t investigating the spooky tunnels hidden underneath the institute that were probably filled with worm corpses and cockroaches and rats and spiders and probably human corpses, knowing their luck, twisting around in tight tunnels until they got lost in the bowels of the Earth -

Look, Sasha didn’t like tight spaces. Was that a crime? 

Martin winced, glancing sideways at Jon. “Tim’s been...exploring the tunnels afterhours sometimes. When you aren’t here. I didn’t think it was very _safe_ , but I just couldn’t stop him!” He glanced sideways at Jon, and although his face was the perfect picture of guilt and fright something about it was almost too perfect. “Tim never listens to me anyway. He says that he can’t trust anyone who hangs out with Jon too much.”

Exactly on cue, Jon abruptly looked guilty and ashamed. “Right. Well, that explains why I can’t find him. Those tunnels are quite adept at blocking my vision.” He scowled slightly. “The Director didn’t see fit to mention...anyway, it’s that blasted Smirke. I never liked him. Pretentious. He was new money, you know. It’s always new money who’s the worst about it.”

“About what?” Martin asked curiously.

Jon grinned, his yellow teeth flashing like a shark’s. “Let’s just say that I was never quite welcome in Jonah’s little clubs. They all regretted _that_. Sooner or later.”

Wow, Sasha really super didn’t care right now. The social life of British aristocrat Jonah Magnus, dead some two hundred slutty, slutty years, was less than relevant to her life right now. “Tim’s always been fascinated with Smirke. If he knew that the tunnels were designed by him…” She glanced back at Martin. “So he’s fine, right? He’s just - late? From exploring the tunnels?”

Martin wrung his hands. “Maybe? But he doesn’t really go during lunch, or when he would obviously be missing from work...I don’t know, Sasha, something about this feels wrong.”

“What do you think, Archivist?” Jon asked, infuriatingly calmly. “What does your heart tell you? Is there something dangerous in the tunnels?”

What did her heart say?

It thumped yes through her veins, her blood screaming danger. Every breath of her that carried life, her mortal and unnatural senses, her all-seeing Eye, knew it. Tim was in danger, and the part of her that loved him so deeply that it scared her was crying out in pain. 

But it had been crying in pain for a while, and that was nothing new. Her heart knew that it was being strangled. Slowly, softly, and gently, but it was dying a slow death all the same. One day, and maybe that day would be soon, it would be gone.

When Jon smiled at Martin like his sun was rising, what made him smile like that? It couldn’t be his heart. There was no part of Jonathan Sims that could still be human enough to care for Martin like Sasha cared for Tim, so what was it?

Or was Sasha wrong?

“I’ll go grab him,” Sasha said, mouth dry. “I’ll make sure he’s okay. Then I’ll kill him.” She glanced at Martin. “Stay here with Jon, make sure Elias doesn’t know where I went.”

“No way,” Martin said heatedly. “I’m going with you. I know the tunnels better than you do.”

“I thought that Tim was going by himself?” Sasha asked shrewdly. 

“If you can’t beat ‘em, might as well join ‘em,” Martin replied with a shrug. “That’s my philosophy.”

“We all know that.” Sasha pinched the bridge of her nose. “Fine. You’re a big boy. Jon, if you think that you can help us, can you -”

“I could, I just don’t want to,” Jon said serenely. “The Director would kill me if I impede your progress too far.”

Why would she ever expect anything different. “Then can you distract -”

“He always knows what you’re doing. Trust me, the last thing the Director wants is for you to stay _out_ of danger.” Jon rolled his eyes, a remarkably childish motion for the man. “Ponce. I’ll try to stop him from interfering further. I really wouldn’t worry about it. He’s been speaking lately of a - well...hm.” He looked thoughtful for a second. “Was that today? I thought it was next week. Didn’t the Director say - darn. This is what I get for not paying attention during his little rants and brainstorming sessions.” He finally settled on just shrugging. “You go find Mr. Stoker. I think I ought to talk with the Director and see what’s going on.”

“Thanks. I guess.” 

No one would help her. She had to do this herself. With Martin. Who she maybe didn’t trust as much as he deserved. Or maybe she trusted him far more than he deserved. 

She was going to _kill_ Tim. 

  
  
  
  


Sasha wasn’t claustrophobic. She really, really wasn’t. She had simply decided never to ever step foot in the tunnels again for a very good, objective reason. Which she could think of later. 

Martin had a supply bag hidden in a dusty box in the Archive library room, which was where the trapdoor to the tunnels were. He easily slung it over his shoulder, polishing his glasses before prying up the trapdoor and opening up a hole in the world to the dark expanse below. Sasha had already exchanged her heels for the trainers she kept on her desk, tying up her hair into a ponytail and wishing she had thought to bring her gym clothes today. She anticipated a fair amount of running for her life, and she always tried to dress appropriately for the occasion. 

“After you,” Martin said politely. 

“I’d really rather have the guy who’s been in there several times go first,” Sasha said bluntly. 

“Wow, you really are scared, huh?” Martin said. At Sasha’s bristling, he shrugged and easily lowered himself down. “Hey, who wouldn’t be? It takes a suicidally brave idiot to spend a lot of time down here mapping them out and trying to see if there’s any monsters lurking down here.”

“Yeah,” Sasha said, staring down into the abyss as the top of Martin’s head disappeared into the darkness, “that would be real stupid.”

Sasha took a deep breath, reminded herself who this was for, promised herself that he was paying for the next five dates after this, and slowly climbed down the ladder into the tunnels. 

It was dark, darker than almost anything she had ever seen. Sasha was born and raised in London, and had scarcely left since she was a child. True dark was something that was uncomfortable to her, almost alien. Her feet found the rungs underneath her as she descended, and soon her feet met solid ground. She turned around, waving a hand in front of her face and shocking herself when she was unable to see it. 

She reached out a hand to the left, leaning slightly to find a wall, and did the same with the right. They weren’t too close. Not too close at all. She could do this. They weren’t that far in. Just a few minutes underneath the earth. Never mind that they might collapse at any moment. That wasn’t too important, not when -

“Here we are!” A beam of light flickered on, and Martin gave it a good few shakes to make the beam steady. “This’ll run out of battery pretty soon, but the good news is I take batteries from all of the recorders that pop up wherever you and Jon go so we’re all stocked up. I have a few extra torches here.” He pressed one into her hand, cheap and plastic but real, and Sasha eagerly flickered it on. It illuminated Martin’s face, just as round and friendly and soft as ever. He was practically hiding behind his big, thick glasses, his neat jumper and khaki pants and close-cropped jet black hair reassuringly familiar. “He usually leaves chalk markings down here to show where he’s gone. If we walk far enough we’ll find them. Hold my torch for me for a second?”

She took the offered torch, and held it above his bag and Martin dug into it and withdrew a map. It was clearly just parchment paper, drawn and scribbled on, and Martin easily unfolded it. “You made all of that?”

“It wasn’t that hard,” Martin said easily, taking his torch back. “I watched a few Youtube videos on cartography. Tim helped a lot.”

“Right.” Sasha squinted at the map, at Martin, then down the dim earth tunnel. “I can’t tell if you two are friends or not.”

Martin just shrugged, casting strange shadows in the dark corridor. “I can’t tell if you two are in love or not.”

“Fair.” Sasha took a deep breath, rubbing her bare arms to try to make the goosebumps go away. “Nobody really gets you, you know.”

“Does that bother you?” Martin asked mildly, pace even and steady as they plunged further into the dark. “I’m not really a complicated person, you know. It’s just that...well, nobody ever really _looks_.” 

They walked for what Sasha’s stressed mind interpreted as ages, although she had no real idea of how long it was. They crawled deeper and deeper into the belly of the earth, and slowly the walls began to close in tighter and tighter around them. It made Sasha paranoid and afraid, feeling always as if they were running out of air or as if the walls would close in so tightly that they wouldn’t be able to wriggle back out again. Like that creepypasta she read once about the cave. Or that Statement, Long John’s Cave or something, take her not me, take her not me, take her not me -

She hadn’t been able to sleep that night, after reading that one out. But it had been a fulfilling meal, hadn’t it? Did her own fear spice the meal, add a little extra zest? Is that why Jon’s strange god hadn’t ripped her humanity from her like it had taken Jon’s, and probably even Elias’? It was more _fun_ that way?

At occasional points, Martin would make check marks with a large piece of chalk, and they would follow marks of chalk left before. Several of them traced over, each with different patterns and types. Strange sigils carved into the earth. But she recognized Tim’s handwriting, and it was hard to fight the sense that they were moving in a spiralling patterns. Twisting, eternally, towards a center. 

She banished such thoughts from her mind. She wasn’t entirely sure that thinking about the golden sequence too long didn’t summon Michael. Sometimes, late at night, when she twisted herself too deep in the threads of code, lost in endless recursion loops and paradox logic, she felt him. It. Michael. Or maybe Michael’s whole, the slumbering eye of whatever great beast Michael was a part of, the god that whispered to her and Tessa Winters both. 

But Tessa had decided on computer science, and Sasha had decided on History and Anthropology. How strange and stupid it was, to think that something as simple as a major chosen as a child could dictate which force you fell to as an adult. 

How had her choices led her here? Because it had to be her choices. She must have done something wrong, taken the wrong job despite the warning signs, continued burrowing relentlessly into that indefatigable need to know. Sasha refused to think of herself as a victim of circumstance, of Jonathan Sims. 

It, somehow, seemed better to think of everything bad that happened to her as her own fault. At least then, someone could suffer for them. Even if it was her. If everything wrong in her life was the fault of men who would never pay, of karmic forces that existed outside of good and evil, then there was no justice. But maybe she already knew that. 

“Are you okay? You look like you’re winding yourself up into a panic attack.”

The walls were closer, now, barely a foot away from her shoulders, but Martin didn’t seem frazzled. Or maybe he was doing a better job of hiding it than her. 

“I’m a bit claustrophobic,” Sasha said tightly. 

“Oh, really? Why?” 

It was a strange and rude question, a question almost nobody had ever asked her, and it threw Sasha so much she almost forgot why she was so stressed. “I, uh - when I was nine, there was this book, and - “

“Jon?”

Sasha stopped short, literally. Martin stopped walking, shining the torch down the narrow corridor, and she bumped up against Martin. She found herself reaching out a hand and grabbing Martin’s jumper, aching for just the slightest bit of comfort. She released his jumper just as quickly, taking a step back. No weakness. 

Jon stood in front of them, just beyond the reach of the beam of light. He was cast in shadow, only his silhouette clea. And it...was Jon’s silhouette...or at least, it felt like it…

“Martin,” Jon said. His voice echoed strangely down the corridor, bouncing and echoing until it held an unearthly tint. “Found Tim yet?”

“No - no, obviously not?” Martin’s voice cracked in uncertainty, as frightened as Sasha. “Jon, how did you get down here before us? Have we been going in circles? Why are you -”

“My dear Martin,” Jon said, softly and fondly and lovingly and so strangely, “you know no one could ever love you.”

The words were so strangely cruel that Sasha felt a sympathetic pang of hurt. Jon wasn’t like that. He was accidentally mean, and struck harshly against any perceived slight, and he did not care if any other human being was alive or dead, but he wasn’t verbally cruel. Not to Martin. 

But Martin didn’t seem to recognize it. He just nodded, torch jerking in his hand and illuminating the tips of Jon’s shoes. Patent leather, strangely wet. “Yeah, I know. Mum always said that, anyway. Between Mum and Dad and you and everyone I’ve ever met, really, that tracks.”

“But you’re happier alone, aren’t you?” Jon mused out loud. “It lets you be as clever as you want. Everyone looks past you, sweet and strange little Martin. No one has ever really seen you. You’re invisible.”

“Jon, you’re being mean again,” Martin said softly. “We’ve talked about this.”

“I suppose we did.” Jon laughed lightly, like nails dragging against each other. “I’m sorry to say I was lying. Manipulating you like you manipulate me. I never changed. All I did was bait the trap. And you just walked in, didn’t you? So desperate, Martin Blackwood.”

No. No, this wasn’t right. That sense within Sasha, the sense that told her when something was right and wrong and true and false, was so strangely muted but it was just _screaming_ that something wasn’t wrong. Sasha’s breah jerked, her chest shuddered, and she twitched the light of her torch upwards until it shone on Jon. 

It, of course, wasn’t Jon. Oh, it was close. Maybe if you squinted your eyes and tilted your head and pretended very hard, in every way that humans pretended just to survive, you could think it was Jon. But it wasn’t, because Sasha _knew Jon_ , and this wasn’t him. 

When had that happened? When had the Devil himself become normal, and ordinary, and boring? What did that mean?

The figure didn’t hiss or jerk away from the light, a demon scalded by the light of day. It just grinned at Sasha, lopsided and razor sharp, and so wrong. 

“Ms. James. My brilliant little heir. So afraid of becoming _me.”_ The figure grinned, and something in it twisted wrong, bubbled and boiled over like molten wax into a different shape. Her own shape. Sasha. Except - except - “You’ve been me the whole time.”

No. Sasha stepped back, brain furiously spinning itself in terrified circles, staring at the figure that looked so much like her but that was so wrong and evil and cruel. She knew, in her heart, that it was what her mother and father saw when they looked at it. If they were to ever see her now, that was what they would see, that _abomination_ -

“You’re the doppelganger,” Sasha whispered, through the haze of fear and horror. “You’re the - the replicator, the clown, the sawdust, where is _Tim_ -”

“Oh, the lad?” The figure bubbled and boiled again, metamorphosing into Tim. But not Tim - colder, crueler, more insane. “I didn’t do anything to _him._ I owe him a debt of _grat-i-tude_ . Timmy Stoker took an _axe_ and gave my table forty _whacks_ and when he saw what he had _done_ he gave Sasha James _forty-one_ .” It giggled, so strangely. “So funny! He thought you were me! So worried that the one person in the world who cares about him was an _imposter_ . Guess he couldn’t believe that he was loved. But who would believe that you were capable of love? Talk about a _laugh!_ ”

And, before Sasha could run or defend herself or scream to die in agony, the doppelganger monster that stole faces and lives _leaped_ for her and Martin -

A wall rose in front of her, separating her from her friend and her enemy both. It was instant, like a door slamming. In one second the monster was leaping for her; in another Sasha saw only dirt and the thin shower of dust. Sasha coughed, choking off the scream that had been building in her throat, too shocked to even wonder what had just happened. 

“Ah, good. That takes care of that.”

Sasha whirled around, coming face to face with -

An old man?

It was an old man. Just this old white guy, with saggy jowls and a thick gut, wearing a stained and tattered greatcoat strangely similar to Jon’s over a dirty suit. His hair was bald at the top, snow white tufts rimming his temples, and he clutched a strange book in his hands. He looked both very sad and a little proud of himself. 

“Come with me,” the old man said. “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe.”

She highly doubted that. But instead, what she asked was - “Martin. Martin’s still stuck with that thing -”

“He’s made his own escape, I believe.” The old man eyed her warily with watery light blue eyes. “It is time for us to make ours. Come with me, Archivist. I mean you no harm.”

Sasha’s throat was dry. Her head was spinning. “Who are you?”

“If I tell you that, then you won’t believe that I mean you no harm.” He turned around to face the wall and read a few more lines from the book that made her head hurt, opening another door deeper into the tunnels. “Let’s make haste. There’s no time to lose if you wish to find your friends.”

She followed him. What else could she do? 

  
  
  


Jurgen Leitner. Jurgen Leitner, the stupid idiot Jurgen Leitner. Goddamn fool book collecting dust eating _rat old bastard_. 

Sasha sat there, in her own fucking chair, at her own fucking desk, listening to his stupid fucking story. His sad backstory. The inspirational beginning of his library. The tragic loss of his assistants. How he started living in the tunnels and eating rats or crisps or what the fuck ever. She didn’t care. She didn’t _care_ . This was her _life_ and Jurgen Leitner thought it was a game. 

Rich people were all the fucking same. 

“I have to say, you aren’t what I expected,” Leitner said evenly, tape recorder whirring quietly on the desk. “Mr. Sims has always had an...eclectic choice of associates.”

The memory of the monster in the tunnels, the demented shadow of Jon, made Sasha’s heart skip a beat. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t. But it had felt so much like him…”You know him? You’ve met him? I thought he’s been out of England for fifty years.”

“Everybody in the business knows of Jonathan Sims,” Leitner said, almost proudly. That _he_ was part of the business, that _he_ knew its secrets. “He has his fingers in every pie, I suppose you could say. Or perhaps an Eye everywhere. Although I’m led to believe that is more true of his partner…” Leitner shook himself, the mention of Elias spooking him when the discussion of Jon didn’t. “More political events than not in the last two hundred years can be traced back to Jonathan Sims, Archivist. The Great Leap Forward, the Red Scare, the Patriot Act...never directly him, no, never anything you can prove. But a whisper there, a nudge there...a single man, given enough time, can be quite powerful. He was...an inspiration to me, in my younger years.” His gaze turned far away, remembering something a long time in the past. “I first met him as a young man. My twenties. So long ago now...he looked exactly the same back then as he does now, of course. He never hid his power. It was...what was it, a business deal. He had heard of my burgeoning collection, and was interested in pursuing some of my books. I had warned him, all self-important, how _dangerous_ they were. How frightening.” His lips curled in a half-smile. “I still remember what he had told me. That his god would protect him. And it did. Mr. Sims’ power is greater than any I’ve ever known. Even greater than that of his partner. I wasted decades searching for the blessing that Mr. Sims’ god bestowed upon him. But I never could attain that final Holy Grail: immortality. Eternal youth. Only person more fanatic about it than me was Mary. I am old, now. But Mr. Sims is still so young. Now I’m nothing more than a jealous old man…”

Sasha leaned forward, excitement thrumming in her veins, electrifying her skin. “What’s this god? Who does Jon serve?”

“And he gives the power to you.” Leitner eyed her, gaze wary. “Why do you deserve it, and I don’t? What is so special about you, Archivist?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Sasha said, leaning forward, _pulling_ the truth out of him. “Tell me what Jon’s god is.”

“I tell you this willingly, Archivist. I do want to help you. Maybe, even just by association…” Leitner sighed heavily. “Smirke named it the Beholding. Sims prefers the term the Eye. An endless flurry of names for the same thing, honestly: the fear of being Watched.”

And Sasha knew. 

But maybe, on some level, she had always known. 

Wasn’t that true? That she had always known? That it had always made sense to her? Sasha knew the eyes that watched her every day at work, that watched her even now, that made her feel like a butterfly squirming on a pin. Oh, but she loved it. She loved doing it to others. She loved knowing, and chasing, and being just the perfect little detective. 

Tim was the same way, with plots and information and discovery. So was Martin, with his relentless and complete understanding of people and psychology. So was Jon, endlessly curious, endlessly searching. Just to scrape up that little bit of blackmail. Just to survive. 

Knowledge was power. Power was survival. And survival was worth everything else. 

Leitner explained the whole terrible story to her, the twisted mythos. The Fourteen Fears of Man and Animal. The codex that separated the terrible experience of life into neat little categories. Gertrude and Michael and Jon and Sasha, Sasha, Sasha. 

“What does Jon and the Beholding want with me?” Sasha asked desperately. “Why am I here? Please, I need to know.”

Leitner shrugged helplessly. “I cannot presume to understand the decisions of gods and demigods, Archivist. Maybe Elias thought that you would serve as an easier patsy than Gertrude ever was. Maybe Jon thought that you would be capable of carrying out the Beholding’s will. If you weren’t up to snuff, they could just kill you like they did Gertrude.”

Of course. Of course they did. Sasha kneaded her forehead. “Elias killed Gertrude. I can’t believe that’s not even the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard so far today.”

In fact, it made far too much sense. Sasha’s hand itched downwards into her skirt pocket, drawing out her silver compact. Leitner was saying something, something about files, but she couldn’t care. She had so much else on her mind. 

She stumbled upwards, fumbling towards the door. “I need a second. I’ll be right back. I just - I just need some air.”

She closed the door behind her. Leitner could wait, for just five minutes. 

Sasha stumbled out of the Archives and down the hallway, so familiar and yet brought into such strange relief, so she could huddle in the bathroom. She numbly went through the familiar and comforting motions of reapplying her make-up, looking at herself through the compact mirror. 

It was her. It was just her. It wasn’t that awful abomination, it wasn’t the cruel doppelganger. Her eyes were brown, not fluorescent green. Just Sasha. Whatever that meant. 

Enough of this. Enough weakness. No more. She would wring every drop of information she could get from Leitner’s fat neck, and then they would all figure something out. Her, Tim, and Martin. Together. Like the good old days that...had never truly existed, because they were the worst team on the planet. 

Sasha sighed, snapping her compact shut and letting the fluorescent bathroom light shine off the etched web pattern. She had been a terrible boss, and a bad friend. She had spent a year figuring Martin was up to something and thinking he was sneaky and untrustworthy because of it, and when she found that he had been _literally_ blackmailed into silence she had never changed her mind about him. He was a good person, kind yet fierce, and he deserved another chance from her. 

Tim deserved better too. She hadn’t been fair to him, or honest. Neither had he, but...their relationship could be better. They had to work at it, but it was work she was willing to do.

She needed them. She couldn’t do this alone. 

Maybe she even needed Jon. 

She walked back to the Archives, deep in thought. Maybe Jon could, like, train her in her evil superpowers. Not make her more evil, just train her how to use them. Georgie had been right, she needed them in order to actually be useful, and that probably meant a cool training montage. Was Jon Gandalf? Master Roshi? Was there like an Evil Gandalf? Or was that just Sauron? Was -

“How much have you told her?”

Elias. 

“Enough.” Leitner’s voice was wary, trembling, and badly concealing fear. Sasha pressed herself immediately up against the wall, heart jumping into her throat. “You knew I was there the whole time, didn’t you?”

“My sight is obscured in the tunnels, but this institute is an extension of my own body.” Jon’s voice, slightly apologetic, and Sasha’s heart froze. “I figured you were...well, harmless. My Archivist’s claustrophobia would have prevented her from ever crossing paths with you.”

“Which is why it’s always useful to speed things up a bit,” Elias said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself. “Honestly, Jon, you’re coddling her too much. Everyone needs to fly the nest eventually. She’ll never learn at this rate.”

“It is the job of the old to make the lives of the next generation easier,” Jon said, sounding impossibly tired. “You of all people ought to know that, Jonah.”

Elias barked a laugh as Jurgen Leitner moaned in fear. “Very good, Jurgen. For once in your life, you’re correct. Nobody who finds out that tidbit lives very long.” He hummed absently. “I’m quite invested in keeping that little secret...well, secret. Unlike you, Jon.”

“I’m just not very much of a liar, I’m afraid,” Jon said apologetically.

“Yes, that was always your problem,” Elias said. “Too obsessed with being _seen_ , I think.”

“Elias...Mr. Sims...please…” 

“Would you like to do the honors?” Elias asked, as if the old man wasn’t even there. As if he wasn’t even important enough to be talked to, to be recognized. As if he wasn’t real. As if the only real people in the room were Jon and Jonah. But maybe, for those two, that was always true. “I always did like the look on your face after a good sacrifice.”

“I...not this time, Jonah.”

“Very well.”

“Elias, _please_ -”

A gunshot rang throughout the basement, a sulfurous clap of sound. And Jurgen Leitner was silent. 

“I always enjoy it when a good plan comes together,” Elias announced over the ringing of Sasha’s ears, sounding very satisfied with himself. His words barely permeated Sasha’s mind, still trying to cope with having indirectly witnessed her first murder. “Things are so much easier when you’re here, Jon. I never would have known Leitner was living here if it wasn’t for you. You should consider staying in London until all of this is over. We’re a good team.”

“Yes,” Jon said quietly, “we always were.”

“You sound upset. Don’t tell me you two were friends. You don’t have friends.”

“Never met the man before in my life.” Jon sounded almost uncomfortable. “But...maybe he had the right idea. About...telling Sasha. About everything.”

“Seriously, Jon?” Elias sounded almost irritated. “Sure, let’s just throw out two years worth of plans because you feel guilty. Don’t let your bleeding heart ruin another well laid plan.”

“I’m serious,” Jon insisted. “This isn’t right. She deserves to know the truth. About her destiny, and our god, and - and maybe even our plans for her. What we need her for. She deserves to know.”

“Blackwood’s gotten to you,” Elias said. “Honestly, Jon, don’t you think that’s a little pathetic? Falling for the first boy in fifty years who bats his eyelashes at you? If you’re going to do that...thing you do -”

“Fall in love?”

“Yes, where you get super annoying.” Elias snorted dismissively. “Just run off with Georgie again. At least she’s a known quantity. Honestly, Jon, he’s just using you.”

“Martin cares about me,” Jon said, so quietly Sasha had to strain to hear it. “He says that I can be different. Better than this.”

“Different? Better? People don’t _change_ , Jonathan. Especially not men like us.” Elias huffed slightly, completely uncaring that they were arguing over a man’s corpse. The hallway was beginning to fill up with the scent of blood. “Blackwood’s just a low class, uneducated idiot anyway. You have nothing to learn from _him_.”

“Martin says,” Jon said dangerously, as if this was his talisman against evil, as if this was the one artifact of truth that Jon had ever known in the face of a world of lies, “that I can be better than you.”

“Excuse me?” Elias asked, sounding more offended than Sasha had ever heard from him. “Everything you are now is because of me. I’ve made you who you are. I’ve made you better.”

“No,” Jon said, “I think you only made me worse.”

Something wet touched Sasha’s shoes.

She looked down to find herself standing in a pool of blood, blood that had been slowly creeping from Leitner’s corpse, and she was so struck with horror and disgust that she couldn’t fight a scream.

Conversation stopped. Sasha’s heart beat so hard in her chest she thought she was going to throw up. She wanted to go home. She wanted Tim. She wanted - she wanted -

“Might as well come out, Ms. James,” Elias said. 

Slowly, with shaking legs, Sasha walked to the doorway. She stood in the doorframe, sneakers slipping in the pool of blood, feeling faint. 

The sight that greeted her was not as gory as she had been half-expecting. A dead body, killed by a single gunshot wound, was almost clean. If it wasn’t for all the blood, for the two men untouched everywhere by the splatter save their rapidly soaking shoes, it could have been another day at the office. Elias looked mildly peeved, as if this wasn’t how he wanted to spend his evening. Jon looked - 

For the second time in Sasha’s memory, Jon looked scared. His shoulders were hunched around his ears, his fists balled tightly. He looked like he was on the defensive. 

“What?” Elias mocked lightly. “Speechless, my dear Archivist?”

“ _My_ Archivist,” Jon hissed. 

“Our Archivist,” Elias - Jonah, Jonah Magnus, of _course_ \- amended easily. As if it didn’t matter. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that my partner didn’t tell me you were there. He’s been so disloyal lately.”

“I had other things on my mind,” Jon snapped. “This is what I mean. I’m not - I’m not a dog, Jonah. Sasha and Martin were right, you can’t keep treating me as if I’ll jump whenever you call -”

“Honestly, Jonathan, use your head,” Jonah drawled, seemingly bored. “All of these humans you’re rubbing elbows with are polluting your mind. Who are you going to trust, huh? The dirty, stupid human that you _know_ is manipulating you that you met a year ago? Your heir, who hates you? Or me?” 

“I -”

“Who taught you how to write, Jonathan?” Jonah asked patiently. “Come on, who?”

Jon hugged himself, eyes wild and uncertain. “You, but -”

“Who taught you to read?”

“You -”

“Who introduced you to society? Baptized you? Brought you into the fold of our god? Was it Martin Blackwood and Sasha James, Jon? Or was it me? Who can you trust, Jon - anybody, yourself? Or _me_?”

“I know, I know…” Jon clutched himself tighter, green eyes spinning in uncertainty. “I know, I know, but I just don’t think -”

“So stop thinking,” Jonah said patiently, “and leave it all to me. Like you’ve always done. Why fix what isn’t broken?” He turned away from Jon, dismissing him entirely. No longer a threat. He pointed the gun at Sasha, making her choke back a scream, but he instead loosely spun it around his finger, flicked the safety, and carefully withdrew a pristinely white handkerchief to wipe the grip clean before offering it to her. “Do you know whose gun this is, Ms. James?”

Sasha’s mouth opened, then closed. She couldn’t speak. 

“It’s our dear Mr. Stoker’s. I planted the man who sold it to him, and after he destroyed the table in a fit of desperation induced insanity I extracted it from him. My man’s willing to testify that it was sold to him.” He carefully placed it on Sasha’s desk. “And now it was found in a crime scene. Wonder how that’s going to look?”

Sasha couldn’t speak. 

“Good plan, isn’t it?” Jonah smiled at her, self-satisfied, as if he was winning over a game of chess and not over a _corpse_. “Granted, I wasn’t exactly planning to do this over Leitner’s body - I was imagining more the corpse of the Not Them dressed up to look like someone sad - but this works just as well. Now. It seems that Mr. Stoker’s going to be sent away to jail for a very, very long time.”

Sasha opened her mouth, then closed it. 

“Unless,” Jonah said patiently, leading her by the hand towards the inextricable, inescapable conclusion, “someone loves him enough to take the fall.”

“This is cruel,” Jon muttered. 

“Shut _up_ , idiot,” Jonah snapped, and Jon fell silent. 

But Sasha wasn’t paying attention, not anymore. She was walking forward, white trainers soaking red with blood, as the desk grew closer and closer. She slowly picked up the gun. Pistol, maybe. Or revolver. She didn’t know guns. 

She put her fingerprints on the grip. 

She wasn’t thinking about jail, or murders, or truth. She wasn’t even thinking about Jonah Magnus and Jonathan Sims. She was only thinking of Tim, his hand in hers, his smile, the way he could pick her up and spin her around, laughing. Sasha had to protect that smile. 

What would she do, to protect the people she loved?

“Excellent,” Jonah said, and when Sasha glanced backwards she saw that Jonah had moved to stand next to Jon. He grabbed Jon by the upper arm roughly, ignoring the man’s wince. “Now if you _excuse_ me, I need to have a serious conversation with my partner. I trust you can get out of here before the police show up. In...oh, two minutes?” Jonah grinned widely at her, even as Jon cringed away. “Run, Sasha James. Run for your life.”

And just like that, Jonah was tugging Jon out the door, and they disappeared with bloody footprints. Sasha was left alone, in an empty room, clutching an empty gun. 

Or not so empty. She turned around, desperate and afraid, and saw a familiar crooked yellow door set into the wall. For the first time, she felt something that she thought must have been impossible - relief, relief to see Michael. 

The door creaked open to reveal Michael leaning against the doorjamb. It grinned at her like a knife, one long and spiked finger curling inwards in invitation. 

“Lost, Archivist?” Michael asked. “Need a lift?”

And, because Sasha did not care if she lived or died, stepped through Michael’s door, the sound of its laughter echoing in her ears. 

They continued echoing - as Sasha felt the hallways twist and turn around her, doors opening to reveal familiar scenes. Tim and Martin, sitting on the curb outside of the Institute, afraid and dirty but alive. Michael had gotten them out. Tim was safe. Sasha was just reaching out her hand, trying to go through to touch him and hold him, when the scene changed and another door opened. 

“This is your stop,” Michael said in her ear. “You’re very welcome.”

The door opened, a young woman standing at the threshold. A cat wove around her ankles, meowing plaintively, and Sasha finally recognized the woman as the impossibly strange and improbably kind Georgie Barker.

But as Sasha stepped forward, as she escaped Michael’s hallways and fell into Georgie’s shocked arms, the same words coursed through her head in an endless stream, haunting and afraid, her own personal poltergeist.

Run, Sasha James. Run for your life.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is theinternationalacestation.tumblr.com in case you want to interrogate me about my choices (they are all good). 
> 
> EDIT 8/24/20: Uploaded a 16k continuation of this (OH MY GOD THEY WERE ROOMMATES...) to my tumblr above. May post it to AO3, not sure yet, but if you'd like to see a little bit more it's under the 'my writing' tag!


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